Deathdream first published by VODzilla.co “Why is he so different? He won’t talk with us. He won’t eat with us. He sits out in the yard all day long, or up in his room. Why won’t he at least let us tell anyone that he’s home?” This is what Charles Brooks (John Marley) wonders about…
The Last Detail first published by Little White Lies, as part 28 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column It opens with its protagonist, a military man who has been off combat duty for a while, receiving a mission while heavily intoxicated. Yet unlike Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which came out six years later in 1979 and…
The Crazies first published by VODzilla.co The first sound heard in George A. Romero’s The Crazies is a cuckoo clock. It is nighttime, and in the interior shadows of the Mitchell house, a giggling boy is playfully trying to frighten his even younger sister. It is a little like the opening to Romero’s earlier, ultra-influential Night…
First published by Movie Gazette Horror writer Roger Cobb (William Katt) has problems. His young son Jimmy (Eric/Mark Silver) has disappeared, his wife Sandy (Kay Lenz) has left him, and he is haunted by his experiences in the Vietnam War with deranged fellow-soldier Big Ben (Richard Moll). So when batty Aunt Elizabeth (Susan French) hangs…
The Deer Hunter first published by Film4 Synopsis: Opening with a wedding and ending with a funeral, Michael Cimino’s Vietnam odyssey takes three Pennsylvania steelworkers to hell and back. Review: It takes a true visionary to see exactly how the times are a-changing. In the latter half of the 1970s, with only Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) to his…
The Ninth Configuration first published by Little White Lies, as the eighth part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “You’re going to die up there.” In William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, whose script William Peter Blatty has adapted from his own 1971 novel, the possessed 12-year-old Regan (Linda Blair) creepily directs these words at an astronaut in attendance…
First published by Little White Lies Much as womanising slacker Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) finds himself late one evening in a rainy Santa Barbara alleyway at the same time as a silhouetted figure dumps a young woman’s body there, Cutter’s Way suffered the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Adapted…
Late Phases (aka Night of the Wolf) first published by Grolsch FilmWorks The first time we meet Ambrose McKinley (Nick Damici), in the opening scene of Late Phases (aka Night of the Wolf), he is checking out headstones for his own tomb. Blind, bitter and bilious, this recently widowed Vietnam vet is undergoing something of a transition, as…