Movieline Online

It’s not the tools you use to tell the story, it’s how you tell it.   That’s a wonderful mantra for filmmaking, which, up until the last decade or so, has been an exorbitantly expensive career to break into.   When digital finally caught up to the look of celluloid, it opened the door for low-budget storytellers to compete on the same stage.   So much so that even that $1000 dollar iPhone in your pocket is professional enough to put together a film that stands up quite well.   Take Threshold (2020) for example, a road movie about two siblings struggling with their personal issues; one facing an impending divorce and dead-end career, the other long-term drug addiction and, oh yeah, a body-swapping curse inflicted by a satanic cult.   Co-directors Powell Robertson and Patrick Robert Young’s creative gamble, besides shooting the entire thing on beefed up iPhones, is that neither sibling’s crisis takes center stage. Sundance dramas masquerading as horror films are nothing new.  Even in

Excuse the personal anecdote, but in this case I think it applies.   On a recent trip to Italy, my part-time career as a film critic inspired our 20-something tour guide to ask what my favorite type of movie was.   When I answered “Italian” his jaw about hit the cobblestone floor.   I explained that certain companies (like Arrow) specialize in obscure genre films from his country, introducing American audiences to little slices of Italian exploitation that had amassed quite a devoted fanbase.   Most of the titles and directors I mentioned were completely unfamiliar to him (although Argento rang a bell) and I quickly came to realize that for much of his generation, Italian films were viewed as second-rate historical oddities not worth the effort to explore.   My tastes were dismissed as wildly left-of-center.   Much like an American 20-something forced to watch something in black-and-white, this Italian was missing out on a world of cinematic entertainment that was right under his nose

Tattoos are still quite trendy; although expressing your style, taste or romantic devotion in permanent ink never seemed to be the wisest decision considering all   three   of those factors are likely to change…along with your saggy skin.     But tattoos have a darker stigma as well, signifying ownership, property and dehumanization.     In 1966’s   Irezumi , directed by Yasuzo Masumura, the artwork forcibly inked on a geisha’s back takes on an almost supernatural quality, the darkness within awakening to match the evil without. Anxious to elope with her lover, Otsuya is duped by a family friend who sells her into slavery as a high-end geisha.  To ensure her fidelity, the new owner instructs a tattoo artist to create a distinctive spider design on her back.  Meanwhile her lover, Shinsuke, murders in self-defense and becomes a lovelorn outlaw, still plotting how to win his fiancé back.  But Otsuya excels in the art of “consuming” men, using her natural skills to exact revenge on those w