A swift cold caress. A metallic blade skims your scalp. The tender handling of hair. The disadvantage of sitting with your back to someone with a lethal tool. You’re at the mercy of a wild array of possibilities that go from the helpful to the obscure. The introduction to The Stylist is a beautiful presentation…
On what appears to be just an average evening, a grinning pizza delivery man (David Harper, “The Clean Bones Gone”) walks through an alleyway carrying a pizza box, heading towards his next address. He’s dressed in a red polo shirt and a red visor, and we quickly discover he’s carrying a plastic bag — a…
Slasher movies have an effective formula. A killer murders victims, evades detection, has a final showdown, gets bested, maybe escapes. It’s an established formula and it has worked for decades. The film may feature absurd situations, narrative conveniences, stupid characters, gratuitous nudity and, of course, gory kills. None of this necessarily makes these films bad….
Shakespeare’s Richard III famously said I can smile, and murder while I smile. The Joker has long been a character who will smile and cackle while he murders and terrorizes. In previous cinematic incarnations, the Joker has been a crime boss fried in acid (Jack Nicholson), an anarchic terrorist (Heath Ledger) and a pimped out…
Sure the Clown Prince of Crime got his accolades in “The Dark Knight,” but now with Joker it seems he’s finally gotten a film all to himself that he’s been deserving of. And it sure has a dark, dark Bernhard Goetz tone to it. Turns out Batman’s archnemesis was just an “ordinary” guy, living with…
In 1978, director John Carpenter made one of the most profitable and influential indie horror films in the history of American cinema, “Halloween.” Some critics argue that it jump-started the slasher genre, although “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and “Ecologia del delitto” (1971) precede it, as well as plenty of Italian giallo flicks and earlier…
It would be an understatement to say that I have been merely looking forward to Glass. Its arrival was all I could think about since it was announced after the release of “Split,” a movie that came out three years ago. Having watched “Unbreakable” all those years ago, I felt my mind break a little…
