Joan Fontaine Centennial: The Witches (1966)

by Jason Adams

Tell me if you've heard this plot before: a closed-minded outsider with a sordid spiritual history comes to a rural UK village where they slowly unravel a plot involving each and every member of the town being in on the ritual sacrifice of a virginal young woman, with a twist. You're thinking The Wicker Man, right? Well seven years before Christopher Lee did his exuberant little dance beside that infamous flaming totem Joan Fontaine got there first in 1966's The Witches, an actual Hammer production (I always think The Wicker Man is from Hammer, but it ain't) that really doesn't get the love it earns...

Click to read more ...

Review: "The Snowman"

by Eric Blume

There aren’t words in the English language which can adequately describe how terrible The Snowman is.  Talented director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) has let the press know that “10-15% of the screenplay” was never shot during principal photography, which certainly explains why nothing in the movie makes a shred of sense.  

The film might be about a detective (Michael Fassbender) who is partnering but not partnering with another detective (Rebecca Ferguson) to track someone who may or may not be a serial killer, the identity of whom may or may not be traced back to a prologue which is undeniably heavy-handed and portentous...

Click to read more ...

Three Spooky Shorts

By Salim Garami

What's good?

I'm going to keep it short (pun unintended) this week. The choice to recommend short films that I am extremely fond off for more mood-setting Halloween season watching might seem uneventful to most. But the occasion is of celebration of an event that might resonate with some South Florida filmgoing readers. The Key West-based lesbian apocalypse horror short Buzzcut by Jon Rhoads and Mike Marrero has just won Best Film at FilmGate Miami's monthly 'I'm Not Gonna Move to L.A.' festival in the middle of its festival tour and if you follow me on Motorbreath, you might have seen me singing the praises of that short wishing better things for it.

So, in anticipation of the day that short might be more easily accessible to everyone, here are 3 horror shorts that I usually find myself indulging in to get into the Halloween spirit.

Click to read more ...

Resident Evil: A Bloody Valentine

By Salim Garami

What's good?

We're already one week into October and so that means a lot of us are in the middle of binging our favorite Halloween watches or trying out some new ones. Personally, I'm revisiting the long-time zombie science fiction action franchise Resident Evil, based on Capcom's survival horror games that made up my childhood and starring the brilliant Milla Jovovich as apocalypstic ass-kicker Alice (self-promotion moment: it's more than likely I'm going to be writing about the series on Motorbreath within the month) and I have a bit of an observation about the concept of the character that I think might at least amuse the Actressexuals among this site's audience...

Click to read more ...

NYFF: Norway's Oscar Submission "Thelma"

by Jason Adams

Sometimes a critic can't help but interject him or herself into a review, and Joaquim Trier's Thelma is one of those times for me. Thelma tells the story of a young woman from a cripplingly religious family who goes off to college and starts having epileptic seizures that coincide with an awakening of same-sex longings. Meanwhile I'm the homosexual son of an epileptic and was raised in a speak-in-tongues Pentecostal church. Needless to say I felt Thelma, you guys.

So much that it's hard to divorce myself critically to see the forest for the dead birds dropping down among the trees. Trier gets so many precise details so right that I know from my own specific, particular life experience - the warm waves of excitement and guilt at discovering drink and swear-words when you first leave home; the way an epileptic seizure can be a sudden horrific tearing open of reality itself's seams -  that I'm more than willing to go along with anything he does, even when it is sometimes a hint too austere for its own good.

It's hard to say something that features a woman deep-throating a python - but you know, in a sexy way - remains austere, but Trier manages. He is Norwegian, after all. Thelma is an ice pond of a film floating over fiery little volcanic eruptions - like its protagonist (an exquisitely conflicted Eili Harboe) Thelma is Fire & Ice, Passion & Repression, a Freudian phantasmagoria strapped into a cool silk blouse.