Ho ho ho, as Santa said to the prostitute trio. Christmas comes early as we bring you a sackful of cinematic toys for your reading pleasure. We come bearing gifts of DVD prizes, alien Jesi, ghost seances, non-lesbian vampyrs, paradoxical drug rehabs, hick hitmen, psionic rampages, sexy violists, Satanic goo, long takes, and Peter O'Toole thinking he's Jesus.
REVIEW WRITING CONTEST #5: Win a signed copy of
The Ghastly Love of Johnny X!
AKIRA (1988): Certified Weird! "With its pallid middle-aged psychic kids, psychotic toy box hallucinations and a mutating telekinetic antihero ripping apart futuristic Neo-Tokyo,
Akira still packs one hell of a punch today. The Japanese have been trying to recapture
Akira's cyberpunk spirit for twenty-five years now, but they have yet to devise a hallucination delivery device to top Ohtomo’s original animated masterpiece."
THE 17TH ANNUAL ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARDS: With our votes and comments.
THE VISITOR (1979): "...will the Visitor ever intervene, or will he spend most of his time wandering aimlessly to theme music that is a bit too dramatic and funky for a man who takes forever to walk down a single flight of stairs? And why is Jesus blonde and surrounded by bald children?"-BS
PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987): "... a few oddball moments poke through the familiar fabric (i.e. Victor Wong fighting grad-student zombies with a shaken-up Sprite and a chopstick, and a 'this is not a dream' dream sequence that’s one of the movie’s better ideas), making
Prince a confounding glimpse at a great weird movie that could have been."
KILLER JOE (2011): "The distinct flicking sound of a Zippo lighter breaking the black sets the stage for
Killer Joe, a film about family, lust, betrayal, and fried chicken."-RA
RESOLUTION (2012): "
Resolution turns out to be all about deconstruction and the plastic nature of reality. By the time we realize this, we've accepted the actuality of what's transpired, only to have the drop sheet yanked out from under our feet."-PD
THE RULING CLASS (1972): "Peter Medak directed from Peter Barnes’ play and, with Peter O’ Toole starring, there is a lot of phallic symbolism afoot. Naturally, being a British movie of the 70s, there is plenty of other symbolism being bandied about as well, including a battle of misfit deities, an assault by an ape in a top hat, Ebenezer Scrooge as a phlegmatic bishop (Alastair Sim), a drunkard leftist butler (Arthur Lowe), a usurping by the Electric Messiah (Nigel Green), and Jack’s miraculous born again transformative 'cure' from Jesus Christ (the God Of Love) to Jack the Ripper (the God of Wrath and Vengeance)."-AE
VAMPYR (1932): "As in a dream, the imagery is often disjointed, but deeply ingrained: a ferryman with scythe, a shrouded river, a shadow departing its one-legged owner, the antagonist dispatched by suffocating from falling white flour in a dilapidated windmill, and the film's nexus, the disquieting vignette in which the protagonist, Allan Grey (Julian West, who financed the film) lies, trapped, in a sealed coffin, perforated with a glass window."-AE
RUSSIAN ARK (2002): "Overcome with nostalgia for the lovely aristocratic past, the Marquis decides to stay behind at the phantasmagorical ballet. His decision validates the Ark’s role in preserving Western culture, but the Russian chooses to go on without him, headed towards an unknown destiny."
NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (2012): "Different permutations of the story coexist, overlapped onscreen: it’s a surreally garbled tale of murder, a young boy’s ominous premonitions of the future, an old man’s dying dream, a self-conscious metafiction, and the memoirs of a ghost, all at the same time. It ends as a haunted house tale set in a cursed boarding house, a place where the ghosts are haunted by their own meta-ghosts."
PAGANINI (1989): "...the rest of the film is, essentially, a series of montages: Paganini plays his violin with searing intensity, women masturbate to him, Paganini plays, horses have sex, Paganini plays, crowds throng to him, Paganini plays, upper class society types deem him the devil, Paganini plays, women succumb to orgasmic heights, Paganini plays, Paganini has uninhibited sex in carriages, Paganini plays, underage girls dance, Paganini walks through the streets-alone, silent, internally determined, Paganini dotes on his son, Paganini plays, Paganini has uninhibited sex in a field of flowers, Paganini plays, Paganini has uninhibited sex on an actual bed, Paganini dotes on his son, Paganini has more uninhibited sex, Paganini composes, Paganini plays, Paganini has even more sex, Paganini helps aspiring young musicians, clerics deem Paganini a rapist of underage girls, Paganini gives to the poor, the ill Paganini comes to increasingly depend on his son, Paganini gets sick and dies. The End."-AE