Posted inArts & Culture

Hostel / Hostel: Part II

From 2005, Hostel drops three collegians into Amsterdam for a debauched vacation of pot and poon, only to accidentally become victims in a bizarre business in which the wealthy pay big bucks to torture the kidnapped in an underground warehouse. Roth spares nothing, leaving viewers to cringe at every slice of the Achilles tendon, snipped […]

Posted inArts & Culture

New York Stories

While many omnibus films have been made in modern times, hardly any — at least in America — tout the caché of this one, letting directors Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) loose to each tell a story set in the city that has a million of […]

Posted inArts & Culture

D.O.A.

Dennis Quaid stars as English professor Dexter Cornell, who somehow contracts a fatal toxin that glows Re-Animator green and gives him 24 hours to live. Rather than just bang one of his students — well, he does that, too — he sets out to find who’s slipped him one mammoth mickey. And in doing so, […]

Posted inMusic

Grand Duel / Keoma

They should also take the back cover’s claim of “two masterpieces” with a grain of salt, even two for good measure, although both films are indeed better than average. That goes especially for Lee Van Cleef, who enjoyed another career in Italy cranking these things out, with little regard to quality. However, Grand Duel — […]

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Dark Crimes

Among the 50 titles here — yes, 50 — are some genuine classics, such as 1950’s D.O.A., Edward G. Robinson in 1947’s The Red House and Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, but I don’t recommend picking up this massive set for those three, as much better prints can be found from, respectively, Image Entertainment, Film Chest […]

Posted inArts & Culture

12 Creature Features

For me, only two of the titles stood out as new, or potentially just overlooked: 1974’s Horror High and 1968’s Kong Island. Both were novel enough that I could see paying $10 for it and not feeling short-changed, as long as you know upfront that the prints are less than pristine. As with such bargain […]

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