Spasmo (1974)

Another movie I tracked down to watch basically because of the Ennio Morricone score, particularly the mellow, haunting title piece, Spasmo (1974) is a giallo mystery that was quite unusual. Starting off with a man (Robert Hoffmann) finding a woman knocked out on the beach (Suzy Kendall), the film’s tone is very over the top […]

Gemini (2017)

I’ve liked director Aaron Katz ever since a friend loaned me DVDs of his early ‘mumblecore’ films Dance Party USA and Quiet City. With Gemini (2017), Katz still retains intimacy between characters and small stakes stories but has more cinematic, smoother visual style now. Much like an earlier film he did, Cold Weather, Gemini is […]

A Bay Of Blood (1971)

Here’s something for Halloween. I watched A Bay Of Blood (1971; Ecologia del delitto) for the first time (one of the many alternative titles is Twitch Of The Death Nerve – what a title!). Directed by Mario Bava, this film is considered very influential in spawning the ‘slasher’ genre with many of its ‘kills’ copied […]

Bad Timing (1980)

Continuing to catch up on the films of Nicolas Roeg after his recent passing, I settled in to watch Bad Timing (1980), a film that failed financially on release and became very hard to see due to its explicit content. Infamously an executive at Rank Organization that released it, said it was “a sick film […]

The Trust (2016)

Among the half dozen movies Nicolas Cage releases every year, there’s always a stray diamond in the direct-to-digital-TV rubble. Well, maybe diamond is pushing it but The Trust (2016) is still a good movie. Elijah Wood and Cage play a pair of Las Vegas cops who work in evidence collection. When paperwork leads Cage to […]