Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973’s The Exorcist, the same year’s Satan’s School for Girls, and 1976’s The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period’s ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom…
This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis’s horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role…
Under the stewardship of underground filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema stands as the vanguard of Baldwin’s personal artistic conviction—what he calls “cinema povera”…
All of the characters in Paul Schrader’s Light of Day (1987) are looking for a way out. They’re stuck in menial nine to five jobs, on the line in factories and behind candy-colored checkout stands in supermarkets…
American cinema of the 1970s has long been recognized for its downbeat, character-led crime dramas. From Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971) to Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) and Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978)…
1984’s This is Spinal Tap is all about the pining—epic pining, as high and fulsome as the band’s hair and the wailing notes they (try to) hit…
The subversive paradox created when Max Headroom turned pitchman for corporate cola is just one of many in the career of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel…
By Alex Adams
Also known as The Return of Godzilla and simply Godzilla, Godzilla 1984 is what we would now call a reboot: part remake, part sequel, a fresh start that retrieved some things from Godzilla’s past while discarding others…
By Alex Adams
In Toho’s 1965 tokusatsu spectacular Invasion of the Astro Monster, humanity makes contact with ruthless hive-mind aliens from Planet X, a new stellar body discovered on the far side of Jupiter…
Outside of David Cronenberg’s work and stray oddities like 1980’s The Changeling, the Canadian horror and sci-fi movies of the 1970s and ‘80s often get overshadowed by their counterparts from the US and Europe…
We Are the Mutants 