Hamlet (1948)

Watching Grand Theft Hamlet this year made me realise that I’d never watched an adaptation of Hamlet. Obviously being one of the big William Shakespeare plays, I know it through pop culture, the famous lines, the references and parodies (thinking of Schwarzenegger doing Hamlet in the parody dream sequence from Last Action Hero). I wanted […]

Full Contact (1992)

A night full of rain lit by the flames from multiple explosions. Motorcycle silhouette and hair metal power ballad wailing on the soundtrack. The Whitesnake MTV music video aesthetic crossed with the HK action cinema Heroic Bloodshed. This is Full Contact (1992), directed by Ringo Lam and reuniting him with star Chow Yun-Fat after films […]

Night Of The Ghouls (1959)

The seance scene. When the camera focuses on Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) – a granite-face middle-aged guy wearing a suit and a “swami” turban – sitting at a table, and the camera moves back so that we can see three people sitting on one side, and three rinky-dink skeletons sitting on the other, I was […]

A Tale Of Sorrow And Sadness (1977)

My knowledge of Seijun Suzuki as a director is around his 1960s gangster movies like Youth Of The Beast, Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill. All of which are shot through with distinctive black comedy and visual panache that made Suzuki beloved to directors he later inspired like Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch. While there’s […]

Winter Kills (1979)

Winter Kills (1979) is the absurdist extension of the conspiracy thriller in vogue during the 1970s. Imagine The Parallax View, a riff on imagined counter narratives to the official record of the JFK assassination, but exaggerated with a strange comedy, not quite spoof or parody. Each scene in Winter Kills is eventually marked by a […]