This review has been an expanded into a video essay that you can watch for free here.
A word I’ve seen used a lot is “atmospheric.” But to me this was the very opposite of atmosphere: dull, fussy, strained; the whole thing felt fake and unabsorbing. Nor is it as visually appealing as I’d heard: however deliberate an artistic choice, all of that backlighting, in fact, looks terrible. The narrative couldn’t be simpler, and yet it’s mangled by choppy pacing…
The intention behind Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill! was not so complex or sophisticated, but it was wonderfully distinctive. Referring to his previous film Lorna, Russ Meyer said offhandedly:
"I had men kicking the shit out of the women [in Lorna], so I thought, 'why don't we do one where the women kick the shit out of the men?'"
About as simple as that. The idea of a roving gang of hyper-feminist nympho-thugs may seem, from our vantage point, all too…
This is a horror remake that makes a deliberate attempt at preserving the spirit of the original, and as that it's pretty successful. Director Steven Kostanski has seen the original series and has some clear appreciation for it.
As a movie, I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than anything from the original series, but right in line with some of the better entries in the series. Nobody can really fill Warwick Davis's clogs, but here it's about as…
One of the reasons this works as well as it does is that they take a bit of time to set things up. It's not Chinatown, but there's a straightforward reason she's going in. I always appreciate a clear sense of stakes, which gives us as least some narrative investment in the fweaky stuff.
As for the fweaky stuff, I thought that was all pretty superb. I was thoroughly impressed by the production design and visuals, which felt considered, impactful,…
One of the only comedies of the 2000s to examine and problematize the diminishing returns of post-American Pie hedonism and horniness. In this sense, 40 Days and 40 Nights was enormously ahead of its time, anticipating a rich complex of currents surrounding sexuality and the problem of pleasure today: no-fap masculinism, anti-porn TikTok, postmodern cafeteria-Catholic Twitter, and even the Netflix dating-competition reality show Too Hot to Handle, which imposes financial penalties on contestants for giving in to their libidinal urges. …
Tasteless, unclever, and not even slightly funny. All the wide-angle lens looked terrible.
Most offensive of all is the empty gesture it makes at having anything interesting to say. The gloating, sardonic whimsy on display couldn’t be more shallow.
