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Reviews & Commentary by Adam Groves
SPACE RAIDERS
A TREASURE ISLAND inspired account of a young boy stowing away on a spaceship, this Roger Corman production was poorly received because, quite simply, it’s a bad movie
IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA (Film)
The one and only Raymond Roussel film adaptation, made by the French TV ace Jean-Christophe Averty
FANTASY MISSION FORCE
This 1983 film is often called the worst Jackie Chan movie ever—it’s certainly the weirdest
RABID
David Cronenberg’s second feature, which stands as an interesting companion-piece to his first, the notorious SHIVERS
DROWNING BY NUMBERS
Three women, all named Cissy, drown their husbands in one of the most inscrutable (and bizarrely entertaining) films made by the UK’s Peter Greenaway
PROFESSOR DOWELL’S HEAD
A Soviet sci fi lark from the 1920s, a far simpler time when authors tended to run riot with coincidence and weird science in pursuit of a good story
CHRONOLYSIS
Disorienting is the word for this very Phil Dickian excercise in reality displacement
HUMANIMALITY
A self-proclaimed “hybrid monster of a book that interrogates humanity’s troubled relationship with its animality, & so its relation to animals, the earth, and ultimately the cosmos”
SNAIL
I don’t know what kind of drugs Richard Miller was on when he wrote this novel, but I want some
NOCTURNAL APPARITIONS: ESSENTIAL STORIES
A newly translated assortment of “Essential Stories” by Poland’s Bruno Schulz
THE KILLING OF THE UNICORN: DOROTHY STRATTEN 1960-1980
A grief-fueled remembrance of the late Dorothy Stratten by “the director who loved her.”
IMAGES
A gaudily designed coffee table art book by the incomparable David Lynch
ECCO: THE STORY OF A FAKE MAN ON 42ND STREET
This is actually the final issue of the initial iteration of SLEAZOID EXPRESS, which took the form of a nonfiction novella by that publication’s editors Bill Landis and Jimmy McDonough
QUENTIN TARANTINO: A GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHY
A graphic novel biography of Quentin Tarantino that is, as the front cover makes clear, “Unofficial and Unauthorized”
UWE BOLL RAW
Exactly what you’d expect from a filmmaker who’s often called the modern day Ed Wood: grammatically suspect, often uproarious and downright pissy
R. I. P. Howard Stern
No, Howard Stern is not dead, but he might as well be
WHORE vs. SHOWGIRLS
Here’s a pairing that hasn’t been made too often, but it’s a valid one: WHORE, a low budgeter from 1991, and SHOWGIRLS, an expensive tentpole release from 1995
Nepo Babies Circa 2025
Yes, the spread of Hollywood nepotism is a glaring issue, but it’s one that, for the moment at least, does appear to be improving
Faust on Acid
The Faust legend reconfigured as avant-garde science fiction? It’s an approach that, in European hands, works far better than you might expect
Still More Thoughts on Movie Titles
THUNDERBOLTS, THE NEW AVENGERS and modern movie titles: the news isn’t good