This movie was so goddamn haunting and heavy to watch. It’s a great noir film with supernatural elements where Mickey Rourke is a 1950s private detective named Harry Angel hired by a mysterious man named Louis Cypher (Robert DeNiro) to find a musician named Johnny Favorite, who owes a debt to him. It sends him on this twisted journey into New Orleans, into the world of voodoo, and unexplained murders of everyone that Angel questions.I had gone into this only knowing of Lisa Bonet’s role and a controversial sex scene between her and Rourke that was pretty nuts to watch, but the whole eerie, haunting vibe to the film got under my skin. Even though I figured out what was really up about midway through the film, that only made me dread the horror even more, and the ending was just bleak as hell. It’s a great film, and an underappreciated performance by Robert DeNiro, who plays his role with such quiet calm with an intimidating backstory.
I randomly came across this late at night on HBO, and had a “what the hell is this?” feeling all throughout before freaking out at the end. It’s a tale of a socially awkward young woman who becomes emotionally attached to anyone who shows interest in her, then murders them when they leave her, piecing their body parts together in her own doll a la Frankenstein’s monster. It’s weird and messed-up, but darkly funny at times, and Angela Bettis is incredibly captivating as May with her Gothic doll looks, as a character who is attractive in her offbeat strange charm.
This was one of the first DVDs I ever owned, next to Cannibal! The Musical. It’s a low-budget horror movie starring Brandon Maggart (also the father of Fiona Apple and Maude Maggart) as a depressed toy maker who makes a list of good and bad kids, is haunted by bad childhood memories, and suffers a breakdown at work after being belittled and goes on a killing spree dressed as Santa Claus.It’s an odd movie that definitely feels of its time, it’s very early 80’s on a low budget. Maggart brings a lot of sympathetic heart to his role, where you can connect with him despite that he becomes a killer in the end. I haven’t seen it in many years, but I remembered liking it as a weird little Christmas horror movie with some care put into it.
This was such a great tense, claustrophobic thriller. I was really sucked into this story, of a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) being held captive in an underground bunker by a paranoid conspiracy theorist (John Goodman), telling her that the air is toxic outside due to a chemical attack, and she can’t decide whether to escape outdoors in case he is lying, or being trapped with his unpredictable wrath as a captor if the air is unbreathable out there. Goodman was so chilling and unnerving, and it’s amazing how terrifying he can be when he’s just quiet and staring down someone. And I’ve always thought Winstead was a great actress who has blown me away in several of her roles, yet she remains pretty underrated in terms of popular actresses. I really loved this film a lot, it’s an excellent tight thriller.
I caught this on the El Rey Network a few years ago, and this weirded me out a lot. Because the villain is played by Klaus Kinski, I did go in expecting him to be a creep, and he certainly delivered. This is about a guy who runs a boardinghouse for women and spies on his tenants through crawlspaces and murders them. It’s weird and uncomfortable to watch, and Kinski’s reputation in real life for having been violent and abusive to his family and colleagues only just makes his performance that much more visceral as a crazed obsessed murderer. In addition, he is the son of a Nazi doctor and has the house rigged so that women became trapped in small spaces and torture devices. It’s a creepy movie, but very memorable and interesting to watch.
I only just saw this last year at the Metrograph, and really liked it a lot as an eerie ghost story. George C. Scott plays a composer grieving the loss of his family after a car accident, and moves to an old mansion near Seattle. He starts to feel the presence of a ghost boy, which reminds him a lot of his late little girl, and he does investigating to find out the hidden backstory behind the boy’s death, including the secrets of a prominent local family. I really liked how old-fashioned this film felt, like a classic haunted house movie, and got into the story a lot and found it captivating.
This movie is so goddamn fun to watch. It’s a great blend of horror and comedy, with this weird dark badass vibe combined with the right kind of comedic timing, likable characters who you don’t want to see die, a talented cast of character actors (Billy Zane, CCH Pounder, Thomas Haden Church, William Sadler, Dick Miller, Brenda Bakke, Charles Fleischer), a solid heroine in Jada Pinkett Smith, and a charismatic villain in Billy Zane. It’s got a hell of an opening song in Filter’s “Hey Man Nice Shot,” and it just makes me happy when I watch it, it’s my right kind of cult horror comedy.
