Candace Hilligoss plays a flighty church organist haunted by phantasmagoric specters of the dead in this forward-thinking classic horror film. The influences feel self-evident, especially in the work of David Lynch (Lost Highways, especially stands out), and in the design of George Romero’s zombies in Night of the Living Dead. It’s a scattered and plotless movie that moves non-linearly toward an ending but also exists in a floaty dream state of perpetual wrongness. It never seeks to correct itself or…

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It’s a battle of the quirky Kaiju curios with Atragon & Frankenstein Conquers the World (AKA Frankenstein Vs. Baragon). How will they stack up in the battle of the monsters? Listen to next week’s Ranking the Monsters and find out.

At the end of the movie, an octopus shows up out of nowhere and clobbers Frankenstein after he has expended himself from the fight with Baragon. Hilarious. Unnecessary. An alternate version of the…

GARY HAMILTON! The windswept Western is one of the best kinds. Here, he we have an Italian cowboy thriller dipping into gothic horror, with many a nighttime shootout and harsh juxtaposition between light and dark, softness and hardness. Against it all is an unrelenting screen of wind — queue significant memories of 1928’s The Wind — and as the weather accumulates and creates a hard force on the dusty hay-strewn town, it gets darker and the themes get darker still,…

What if the opening of McCabe & Mrs. Miller were stretched to fit an entire movie? The same weeping lyricism of the soundscape of that revisionist Western, placed into a stranger in a strange land film where nothing particularly happens, there is no story, but there are quasi Italia Western clacking instrumentations and a sense of fluid wanderlust. The film is floating in the water and basking in the sun on a hot day. Landlocked by sharks and an elegiac sense…

Friends Rec Festival 2022 / Matt

Messiah of Evil floats within the reverie of ‘70s dreamscape vibes. There is a loose plot but it isn’t central here. Instead, the scattering of scenes and images, the distinct moments of release and escape from form and function, highlight the true depth of the work. The deeper it goes the fuller the full picture becomes, created by such strong spaces of imagination, disconnected but not atonally; the parts are all pieces to the…

Do you ever see movies not knowing anything about them? With only a genre, a cover, and a title in hand? That’s the best way to experience new movies, sometimes, without the glut of excessive information that can be gathered on the internet. Just by a basis of “yes, I’ll watch this, because the cover is fine.” The way we used to do it at the video store, the way you used to do it, by necessity, while channel flipping,…

Friend Rec Festival 2022 / David

You could not name a more iconic trio than Romero, Goblin, and Savini. Talk about getting all of the ideas on screen and making every bit tick with craftsman precision. These must also be the most magnificent zombies of the screen. I adore their lurching slowness, their swarming masses, their grotesque monstrosities that make such clever, easy analogues for the craven hyper-consumerism of Americans. It works so beautifully well. The mall may be a…

There are certain movies where nothing happens. Even when there are visuals on-screen, none of it might mean anything. There are actors in this movie (Leslie Nielsen & Jamie Lee Curtis, even) and it has been… directed. There are scenes in the movie. There is some slashing which is disappointing because it still feels like nothing. The reason may be a lack of characterization, we cannot worry for characters we’ll never know, and we can’t really empathize with a killer who…