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Reviews & Commentary by Adam Groves
TOYS
An allegedly kid-friendly fantasia that works best as a grown-up spectacle viewed with appropriate chemical enhancement
SMILE
Overrated!
THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING
One of the more notable box office flops of 2022 was this ambitious ARABIAN NIGHTS themed fantasy from the great George Miller
EXOTICA
The foremost film ever made by Canada’s Atom Egoyan, an elliptical, provocative and altogether fascinating 1994 drama
MIGRATING FORMS
Probably the most memorable film yet made by James Fotopoulos, whose career-long debt to David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD is most evident in MIGRATING FORMS
SEVEN DAYS
Hugely popular in his native land, Senecal deserves to be better known in ours—although SEVEN DAYS probably isn’t the best place to start
THE VAMPIRES OF ALFAMA
A most interesting and unprecedented addition to vampire lore from the French filmmaker and sometime novelist Pierre Kast
THE COFFIN THINGS
Michael Avallone (1924-99) was one of the most prolific hacks of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, and this is one of his better novels.
MANIAC
One of the sickest surprises of December 2020 was the release of this graphic novel, which breaks new ground in splatterific excess
COOL WORLD
In the lexicon of unmade, or rather ill-served, screenplays, COOL WORLD deserves a place of honor
CUT! HORROR WRITERS ON HORROR FILM
Here we have a severely mixed bag of nonfiction pieces about horror film, all written by horror novelists
THE CONNOISSEUR’S GUIDE TO THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM
This 64-page horror movie review compilation is notable as (in its original self-published 1983 edition) the first-ever book by the late Chas. Balun
CINEMA MACABRE
Getting a bunch of novelists to write horror movie commentary is frankly a pretty dodgy proposition
CINEMA FUTURA
A companion-piece to CINEMA MACABRE, by a variety of popular authors, each contributing a write-up on a favored horror movie. The similarly formatted CINEMA FUTURA’S essays are focused on the cinema of science fiction
A CHILD CALLED “IT”
You nineties nostalgia buffs may remember this book, which received a fair amount of media coverage back in ‘95
The Complete Memoirs of Charles Willeford
Here I’ll be looking at four autobiographical volumes by the late Charles Willeford
1995: The Year in Bedlam
Some great films premiered in 1995, including Michael Mann’s HEAT, Todd Haynes’s SAFE and Mike Figgis’s LEAVING LAS VEGAS
1996: The Year in Bedlam
From a cinematic standpoint 1996 can be viewed as the beginning of the end on two counts
Kid Movies in the Summer of 1985
Looking back at the summer movie season of 1985, it becomes immediately apparent that kid movies were all the rage
Hallmark Channel Summer Nights Movies
Having already covered the Hallmark Christmas movie phenomenon and “Spring Fever” cycle, I feel it’s time to discuss the movies of Hallmark’s “Summer Nights