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    Witchfinder General comes close to being the ultimate revenge fantasy.  It is unique in other ways too.  Vincent Price gives possibly his all-time best performance, working with a director…

  In 1984, a brilliant theater director and playwright made the jump from the stage into movies.  Stuart Gordon was virtually an unknown outside Chicago.  Out of all his choices,…

     Dead Alive is an easy movie to dismiss.  It features non-stop humor, most of it over the top and too camp-y to believe.  But its approach to the…

    Sometimes you have to accept a movie on its own terms.  Many critics would mention I Walked With a Zombie as an example.  Like these critics, I feel…

    The years spanning the mid 60’s and the early 70’s saw some major changes in American movies, and in movies worldwide.  Barriers on nudity (The Pawnbroker, Women in Love)…

 For most of us, The Blair Witch Project (1999) was the first horror story we experienced that tried to disguise itself as real-life events.  (A few novels had actually done…

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     Henry was definitely not the first serial killer movie.  For that, you need to go back to Fritz Lang’s M (1930), maybe further.  But it came out early…

     Audition begins as a quiet, thoughtful character study.  You may be reminded of Ordinary People, the under-rated late-60’s drama Rachel, Rachel, even a serious variation on Sleepless in Seattle. …

     I don’t write about many big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. But writing about Aliens feels like a privilege—like describing someone you feel honored to know. It has all of this: solid…

     You watch, helpless, as a woman transforms into a mass murderer. You can read her thoughts…it doesn’t take a mind reader: People are going to grind you into…

     Frankenstein dates back a long time, all the way to the dawn of talking pictures. Because so many of its themes have been borrowed or expanded on since then,…

     Like I Walked with a Zombie, Suspiria, and many more, you need to acceptCat People on its own terms.  Not everyone, especially younger people, will find it scary.  I…