Movieline Online

The rape-revenge exploitation subgenre it a tough one to defend, especially in the “Me Too” era.  While its female protagonists typically punish the men responsible for their physical and emotional degradation in pleasingly painful ways, the films make us (as male viewers especially) complicit in the initial attack itself in often titillating fashion. There’s no doubt we’re supposed to  feel  the character’s pain, but are we being asked to  enjoy  it as well?   It's an uncomfortable question.  And  Thriller: A Cruel Picture  (released in the U.S. as  They Call Her One Eye ) continues to straddle the philosophical fence, punishing its mute heroine from frame one then letting her wreak bloody vengeance for a lifetime of male (and female) oppression.   No small surprise that Tarantino found enough inspiration in this offensive cult classic to reference its character in the  Kill Bill  saga.   Mad...

Director Enzo G. Castellari doesn’t attract the same kind of attention as his fellow genre-workhorses in Italian cult cinema circles.  Perhaps because his films never went overboard on gore (like Fulci) or caught on with U.S. distributors (like Leone).  On the whole, Castellari’s work is indistinguishable from other films of the period: fast-paced knock-offs of  Death Wish  and  The French Connection .  But the action scenes, which vacillate between Peckinpah-inspired slow-motion and whip-pan intensity, are cinematic creations unto themselves.  Castellari puts his camera right in the thick of things – tumbling weightless off a cliff, between the headlights of a muscle car, or popping off a thug through a 1-inch diameter pipe.  There’s an energy to his choice of angles, a devil-may-care inventiveness to his staging that was an obvious influence on modern-day filmmakers.   And  The Big Racket  finds the d...

As the birth of cinema gets pushed further and further into history, fewer filmmakers – and audiences – find much fascination with its origin story.  Certainly 2011’s Oscar winner  The Artist  was a trendy outlier but the era of silent movies is about on par with reading Latin for relaxation as far as most viewers are concerned.  And Kaizo Hayashi’s  To Sleep So as to Dream  (1986) presents its  own  challenges as a post-modern play on film noir, silent cinema and experimental techniques all at the same time. A pair of sleuths are hired by a mysterious woman to track down her kidnapped daughter, following a set of riddles and an ever-increasing ransom that will ensure her safe return.  But the detectives become unwitting participants in the finale of a banned silent movie that never reached its conclusion onscreen…and now must bleed into real life.   That is if  anything  about  To Sleep So as to  Dream...

The birth of Frankenstein’s monster is a singular moment in cinematic history.  Director James Whale imbues the scene with all the sound and fury worthy of Victor’s scandalously sacrilegious ambition, capped off by one of the most quotable bits of dialogue ever uttered: “It’s alive!”  It’s a tough act for Kenneth Branagh, director and star of 1994’s  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , to follow.  But stripping down to the waist and leaping about the laboratory with  Flashdance - style vigor is most decidedly  not  an improvement.  It’s the first of  many  misguided decisions in this follow-up to Coppola’s equally baroque – but much more visually interesting –  Bram Stoker’s Dracula ; a classic monster resurrection that bottomed out with  Wolf  with same year. Like Coppola’s film, putting Shelley’s name above the title suggests a certain amount of respect for literary accuracy.  But the script diver...