I've been a fanatical movie buff since I was a little girl, thanks to my parents who encouraged my brother and I to watch anything and everything we wanted, even the stuff deemed inappropriate for minors. I work, write, and reside in San Francisco the city where I was born and bred.
2009 may well be remembered as the year of the remake or reinterpretation of classic B-film slasher movies. Sorority Row — an update of The House on Sorority Row — continues this trend. Regrettably, it appears new ideas may be a little thin on the ground. It’s disappointing because the genre is in serious need…
Recycling, regretfully, seems to be the name of the game in Hollywood these days. On the horror front, we’ve been treated to remakes of The Last House on the Left, My Bloody Valentine, and Friday the 13th. In the musical realm, Fame will soon be released. And in the drama/thriller department, we now have a…
In Zack Snyder’s brilliant film version of Watchmen, it isn’t business as usual for a group of rag-tag costumed do-gooders living, working, and laying low in the alternate world of a Nixon-era 1985, a time when masked crime fighters have been outlawed. In much the same way as Chris Nolan did for Batman in the…
Watching a Tyler Perry movie is like wandering around in a fog of cinematic confusion. Invariably the question arises, “Just what kind of movie am I watching?” A melodrama? A comedy? A morality tale? A message movie? A Sunday morning sermon? All five in one? Radical shifts in genre, tone and mood incline me to…
It’s a bad sign when the predominant reactions to a horror movie are sarcastic shout outs and hysterical laughter. Contrary to expectations, The Unborn delivers the unintentional laughs but not the scares. It’s beginning to look like horror movies aren’t supposed to be scary anymore. Strange things are happening to teenager Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman)….
I realize I’m aging myself here, but I was a teenager in the late 1970’s and as such I wasn’t paying too close attention to what was happening on the political scene at the time. I was much too caught up with the illicit thrill of cutting classes, shopping, and disco dancing. So when David…
What do you do for a popular, once bankable action hero whose star has plummeted and whose current films bypass theatrical release and go straight to video? Why, you resurrect him of course. And thankfully that’s just what director Mabrouk El Mechri has done in his new film, JCVD. Fans of “The “Muscles from Brussels”…
