Michael Compton

Michael Compton

Favorite films

  • Videodrome
  • Cemetery Man
  • Nekromantik
  • The Devils

Recent activity

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  • Suspiria

    ★★★★★

  • Withnail & I

    ★★★★½

  • Dune: Part Two

    ★★★

  • Crimes of the Future

    ★★★★

Recent reviews

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  • Suspiria

    Suspiria

    ★★★★★

    No in-depth study of horror cinema is complete without a study of Italian horror. No in-depth study of Italian horror is complete without a study of Dario Argento. No in-depth study of Dario Argento is complete without a study of Suspiria. While the buzz surrounding the recent Luca Guadagnino remake is largely favor, the likelihood of it surpassing the Argento original is understandably slim.

    Heavily inspired by influential Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, Argento helped pioneer the giallo subgenre, a series…

  • Withnail & I

    Withnail & I

    ★★★★½

    In the annals of British cult cinema, few films are as memorable, quotable, hilarious or counterintuitively heartfelt as Withnail & I. At once a buddy farce, a road trip film, and a drinking comedy (a drinking comedy that puts on the airs of a stoner flick), Withnail & I burst onto the ‘80s indie scene in much the same way its title characters drunkenly barge into Penrith’s quaint, countryside, tea room. 

    Manically written and directed by Bruce Robinson (How to Get Ahead…

Popular reviews

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  • Slender Man

    Slender Man

    ½

    The synopsis sounds simple enough. Four small-town teens perform a ritual they largely believe to be a joke, evil’s unleashed, terror ensues. While this tried and true formula worked fine for genre classics such as Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead or Bob Clark’s Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, here it’s more of a cheap crib off The Ring wherein our quartet of doomed youths, led by actress Joey King (of The Conjuring fame) watch a weirdly edited online video,…

  • Crimes of the Future

    Crimes of the Future

    ★★★★

    Innovative sampler platter of much of David Cronenberg’s earlier work. It shares its namesake with Cronenberg’s first feature film. It features characters who secrete acidic saliva to dissolve their food (like Seth Brundle in The Fly). It stars Cronenberg collaborator Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises). It continues Cronenberg’s themes regarding humanity’s merge with technology and his meditation on how we consume art, akin to Videodrome and eXisteZ (forming something of a loose trilogy with those latter two films). It’s not as good as Videodrome (or The Fly for that matter) however, were it Cronenberg’s last film, it’d be a worthwhile swan song.

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