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Reviews & Commentary by Adam Groves
RESURRECTION
Buddhist-infused dream-horror from China
HOW TO SHOOT A GHOST
A 27 minute film directed by Charlie Kaufman that’s every bit as quirky and idiosyncratic as you might expect
BACKTRACK
A 1989 directorial effort by the late Dennis Hopper that isn’t bad
THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO
The directorial debut of the late Tony Scott, adapting a Henry James novella for 1970s TV.
VICE SQUAD
A 1982 film that remains a standout in the trashy thriller category
DARKENING ISLAND
A long out-of-print SF novel that’s attained newfound popularity in the 2020s. Why? Its premise, involving a future England overtaken by foreign refugees, now has a resonance it didn’t possess back in 1972
THE REVENGE OF FANTOMAS
The surrealists hugely revered the Fantomas books, and they must have especially liked this one
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”
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
On SLEAZOID EXPRESS
Of the “Big Three” horror/exploitation film review zines, which included PSYCHOTRONIC and GORE GAZETTE, SLEAZOID EXPRESS tends to be the most acclaimed, and apparently boasted “The largest circulation of anything of its particular type.”
Werner Herzog, Ken Russell, Jean-Luc Godard, Nobuhiko Obayashi and MOMENTOUS EVENTS
It certainly seemed like a good idea: a Russian American co-production in which six world class directors partook in “the gigantic cinematic canvas of historical change in Russia,”
2024: Bedlam in Print
Another year, another underwhelming showing from the mainstream publishing industry
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