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Reviews & Commentary by Adam Groves
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
THE HITCHER (1986)
A true slasher classic from the eighties
JOHNNY MNEMONIC
A film that was forecast to be a revolutionary melding of cyberpunk and mainstream sensibilities, but is best viewed nowadays as a dry run for THE MATRIX
A KARATE CHRISTMAS MIRACLE
A film whose “qualities” are summed up by its title
A VERY NUTTY CHRISTMAS
One of the weirder Lifetime movies I’ve seen, offering a cockeyed inversion of THE NUTCRACKER and a message that fully lives up to the “nutty” designation: that true holiday cheer is possible only through the intercession of a doll in human form
NOCTURNAL APPARITIONS: ESSENTIAL STORIES
A newly translated assortment of “Essential Stories” by Poland’s Bruno Schulz
BURNT OFFERINGS
Potent but overrated haunted house scares from the 1970s
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVES
A deliberately overwrought Frenchified attempt at American noir fiction, with some mighty saucy passages
THE LONG WALK
This was the second, and most interesting, of several Stephen King novels published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym
THE WILDS
So-so wilderness horror from the eighties
VIDEOSYNCRATIC
A book that provides a potent blast of nostalgia for those who remember the video rental era, while showing younger readers precisely what they missed
CANNIBAL ERROR: ANTI-FILM PROPAGANDA AND THE “VIDEO NASTIES” PANIC OF THE 1980s
One of the key textual resources on the “video nasties” scare that swept England in the 1980s
HITS, FLOPS, AND OTHER ILLUSIONS
In which a high-profile film director and TV producer recounts his “Fortysomething Years in Hollywood”
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL
The long-in-coming memoir by the German filmmaker and sometime actor Werner Herzog
HOW LUCKY I WAS: MY LIFE AND TIMES
The self-published autobiography of a writer, professional poker player and teacher who once counted yours-truly among his pupils
David Lynch By the Decade
A look back at David Lynch’s fifty-plus year career in film, decade by decade
2024: The Year in Bedlam
Let’s face it: the movies of 2024 by and large sucked
2024: A Look Back in Bedlam
A look back at all things Bedlam
Christmas TV Specials for the Irreparably Brain Damaged: The Japanese Editon
Holiday TV specials from the Land of the Rising Sun
Remembering That Which is Better Forgotten: THE CANNONBALL RUN
One of the great curiosities of late Twentieth Century American cinema was the monster success of THE CANNONBALL RUN in 1981