Dr. Vincent M. Gaine is a film and television researcher. His first book, Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2011. His work on film and media has been published in Cinema Journal and The Journal of Technology, Theology and Religion, as well as edited collections including The 21st Century Superhero and The Directory of World Cinema.
What we find scary will vary enormously. For some it’s the supernatural, for others the psychological. We may be revolted by physical suffering or horrified by social oppression. The Owners is a film that capitalizes on multiple registers of fear to create an unsettling space, both within the framework of the film and more widely,…
You can count probably the number of films made with puppets and/or dolls on one hand (excluding Muppet the universe, of course). Adding one more to this list is Nicole Brending’s “Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture,” a visceral look at today’s pop culture. Using nearly rigid dolls in a dramatic,…
Dollhouse: The Eradication of Female Subjectivity from American Popular Culture might be the most grotesque and nauseating films you see this year. It might also be one of the most relevant and important. Following the story of (fictional) teen pop music sensation Junie Spoons, Dollhouse is a mockumentary in the style of a tabloid news…
The Rental is a film that offers many generic elements. It combines aspects of horror and thriller, and within those we find features of the surveillance and home invasion sub-genres, and also the well-worn slasher. The characters are combinations of private, professional and political concepts, and the clashes between these form much of the drama…
Danny Wolf’s three-part documentary sets itself a tall order. Identify, present and discuss a set of cult films, all the while trying to define what a cult film is and why. For the most part, director Wolf and his co-writers Paul Fishbein and Irv Slifkin succeed in this convoluted and potentially confusing task as, with…
The juxtaposition of comedy, tragedy and horror is a tricky thing to pull off. Lean too hard one way and the comedy can be inappropriate or just lame and unfunny. Lean another way and the tragedy can be unintentionally comical or painful. And lean the third way and the horror can be silly. Those films…
To describe the plot of One Cut of the Dead is to (slightly) spoil it, but it is also to highly recommend it. Without giving away too many details, director Shin’ichirô Ueda delivers a film within a film within a film (plus a bit extra), making it a gloriously meta-meta movie about movie making. If…
