Spielberg’s monster shark movie is 35 this summer. Favourite film? No question about that. I saw it at the tender age of six and sat nervously in the cinema with no idea of what I was about to see. I remember that the fabric the screen curtains were made out of also decorated the walls. [...]
And so my introduction to Italian Horror Cinema finally concludes with Dario Argento’s supposedly seminal ’Suspiria’, released in ’77 and the last film ever to be processed in glorious Technicolour fact fans. It’s a companion piece to ’Inferno’ in that it deals with the last of ‘The Three Mothers’, Mater Suspiriorum, The Mother of Sighs, who we find exacting vicious [...]
He may only have made a handful of great films and directed just one of them, but George Lucas deserves a 14th of May, birthday greeting anyway. I know he likes going back and tinkering with stuff that geeks the world over hold close to their hearts. Like I know that the last Indiana Jones [...]
“Hi, I’m Robert Downey Jnr – and I’m Gwyneth Paltrow – and we’re here to tell you about ‘Iron Man 2′ – it’s great! – yeah, she’s right, it’s great. Did I say great? I meant ‘magnificent’. We’re talking, errrr – personally, I think it’s twice as good – yeah! – as the first one [...]
I refuse to call this by its American title, ‘Cemetery Man’, because it’s just so jarhead prosaic compared to the poetic Italian original: ‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ - ’of Death, of Love’. Aaaah, Venice. It’s also a play on the principle character’s name – Francesco Dellamorte, as embodied by superbly barneted oxbridge homohunk Rupert Everett in a career best performance – and it’s the [...]
Two weeks into the New Year and Britain was plunged into the worst arctic conditions for over three decades. Not only did we have to live with the New Year Blues and a lack of sunshine, we also had to contend with an unrelenting weather pattern that threatened to bolster an army of global warming [...]
Well, I was going to just comment on Dario Argento’s ‘Inferno’, but my wife popped out for an Indian with the girls last night so I decided to watch it again, but this time in a double bill with Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’, in the hope that one might illuminate the other. Was it a brilliant idea [...]
We’re only a week into 2010 and I think I’ve already seen one of my top ten films this year – what’s going on? It’s not a Rom-Com, a Gross-out Comedy, or a worthy adaptation of a prize-winning book, but a movie about Vampires. A film with Vampires that actually made me jump for the first [...]
Roomybonce: And so, after two elegant cruises through the crimson corridors of Italian Horror courtesy of Mario Bava, the wheels come off in a cartwheeling Richard Hammond stylee with this 1971 effort from bony-faced Giallo ‘genius’ Dario Argento. Here’s the plot: Dreamy haired progrock drummer Michael Brandon is stalked by a dirty old chap in a mac. Understandably annoyed, our hero turns the tables and follows his pervoid [...]
Fifteen Hundred years after the birth of Christ, Christopher Columbus’ trip to the States reconfirmed what the Ancient Greeks knew and the Dark Ages lost; the Earth ISN’T FLAT. In 2009, fifty four years after the birth of cinema’s 21st Century Messiah, another JC – James Cameron – and ‘Avatar’ confirmed to me that the future [...]
