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    • action
    • comedy
    • low budget
    • martial arts
    | Nov. 24, 2016, 4:16 p.m.
    Hollywood, as life, is never quite fair. The sure fire winners don’t always win. The talent that’s supposed to become huge stars don’t always graduate to their deserved level even if their work becomes appreciated in due time. If there’s a positive to be found, it’s in films like Blind Fury. Rutger Hauer’s performances in his early European output through American features like Blade Runner and Nighthawks proved he had the chops and the presence of a major Hollywood star, but none of these films panned out in their initial release. By the late eighties Hauer was relegated
    • horror
    • low budget
    | Sept. 20, 2016, 10:47 p.m.
    American Horror films are often the most derivative of genres. For as long as there’s been film in theaters, horror has been treated as a low-risk, medium reward endeavour. It attracts opportunists and auteurs in equal measure. Even some of the leading lights, like John Carpenter and Sam Raimi, got into the genre hoping to use it as a quick stepping stone to other projects (westerns and comedies, respectively). The first Friday the 13th was created by a soap opera writer on the lam. Given a brief description of the plot, you could generally place a horror film
    • action
    • low budget
    • western
    | Feb. 25, 2017, 7:16 p.m.
    Ennio Morricone knows more about effectively building suspense than director Giulio Petroni in Death Rides a Horse. Where the camera lingers on a scene two beats too long, the score murmurs, pulses and chants in sort of futile compensation. It joins Superfly among the films where the score is the main saving grace. There’s a boy, Bill, who watched bandits shoot his father dead and then murder his mother and sister after a gang rape. He only sees the face of the leader, but glimpses tell tale clues for the others: a tattoo of four aces; a spur;
    • low budget
    • Science Fiction
    | Aug. 28, 2016, 6:50 p.m.
    We all want to be the alpha, the hero of the story. Col. Van Heusen is convinced he fits the bill. Made to order tall, dark, and handsome with the confidence of a man who’s only known success. He commands a spaceship whose crew includes his spouse, Ann, herself a beauty. Heusen’s mission is to retrieve Col Carruthers the lone survivor from mankinds first expedition to Mars. Carruthers is suspected of going mad and murdering his crew immediately upon landing on the red planet. For Heusen, it’s not enough to bring Carruthers to Earth for trial. He wants
    • crime
    • low budget
    | March 9, 2017, 11:37 p.m.
    With “Massacre Mafia Style” it’s not a question of whether the gun we see in the first act will be fired in the third. The film lives up to its billing immediately. After exchanging words with a receptionist two thugs enter the office of a wheelchair-bound man. They’re plain with their intentions: gagging the man, rolling him to a restroom and using a running urinal and exposed electrical wire to finish the deed. The act concluded, the two men draw their pistols. They walk back past the receptionist and calmly shoot her through the head. They turn their attentions
    • crime
    • low budget
    • martial arts
    | Aug. 18, 2016, 11:02 p.m.
    Woo-Sang Park is an auteur on par with Ed Wood. While neither never troubled the cinema world with classics, they still were able to build up a surprising number of films before their luck ran out. IMDB lists twenty directing credits for Woo-Sang Park stretching from the early seventies to the late nineties. As Wood found out, when busking on the edges of cinema you pretty much hop from sucker to sucker, giving your patrons enough of what they want while sneaking in at least part of your vision. The sucker this time was one Y. K.
    • crime
    • low budget
    • thriller
    | Oct. 28, 2017, 9:56 p.m.
    While mute seamstress Thana (Zoe Lund) makes her way home, a burglar is breaking into her apartment. As if to reassure the audience, his fumbling through the belongings is intercut with shots of dead meat, neatly stacked in a supermarket that Thana peruses. On her way home, groceries in tow, Thana is pulled into an alley by a masked man (director Abel Ferrara, one upping Dario Argento). He slings Thana over a trash can and quickly rapes her, whispering creepy nothings in her ear. He promises they’ll see each other again as he runs off. <span
    • comedy
    • horror
    • low budget
    • Science Fiction
    | Sept. 30, 2017, 6:16 p.m.
    After losing his minimum wage job, Otto (Emilio Estevez) is conned into helping Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) repossess a car. After getting the taste of the repo man life, Otto finds himself drawn to the profession. Meanwhile, a renegade scientist (Fox Harris) slips into town in a Chevy Malibu. In the trunk lies destructive evidence of extraterrestrial life. Repo Man’s most interesting comparison is probably Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Whereas the former was more a vehicle for Spielberg to test out big budget filmmaking and hone his voice, the latter runneth over with ideas
    • horror
    • low budget
    • slasher
    | Aug. 13, 2017, 4:58 p.m.
    In my youth, as a frequenter of mom and pop and national chain video stores, I thought I possessed the fine ability to sniff out a unworthy film simply from the box art. Sleepaway Camp always failed my test. The box illustration showed an adidas sneaker punctured by a butcher knife, the hallmark of a by the numbers slasher film. I was wrong, I now know. What should have clued me in was how year after year, decade after decade, across all the stores, there always sat a copy of Sleepaway Camp. Other horror and exploitation films came