If you live in or near Chicago, check out the new play Soul One, premiering Thursday, March 31. It’s written by and features Travis Hughes, a great Chicago-based writer and it promises to be a cool night out. Click here for more info. Read all the extraneous crap that goes through my head by following […]
Monthly Archives: March 2011
And Sucker Punch bombs. Counting Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder’s last three movies failed to make back their budgets at the U.S. box office. While Watchmen and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole did add decent worldwide totals to their U.S. box office takes, when you factor in prints and advertising and the cut of […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen Larry Cohen’s first excursion into the blaxploitation genre (unlike many people, I don’t consider 1972s Bone to be a blaxploitation film), Black Caesar is a solid morality tale with gangster film trappings. If not for the profanity, nudity, and graphic violence on display, it could be a Warner […]
It’s a very risky project when a filmmaker tries to make a genre film that wears a political message on its sleeve. But that’s exactly what co-writer/producer/director Larry Fessenden did with The Last Winter. Unlike other films that have attempted to merge an ecological message with horror elements (I’m looking at you The Happening), Fessenden […]
I started work on my first new screenplay in over a year today. I was afraid that I’d have trouble getting started, but it turns out it’s just like riding a bike. If you’re riding that bike into the teeth of a 50 mph wind. Uphill. In a driving snowstorm. Still, it felt good to […]
On Friday, I’ll be introducing Criminally Ignored, a new column dedicated to great films that either received no theatrical or barely there theatrical releases. While this sounds like a wide net I’m casting, the idea is to narrow things down by focusing on movies that no one saw and have failed to become cult favorites […]
Written and Directed by Larry Cohen I first saw Special Effects in the early ‘90s when I was still discovering my affection for Larry Cohen’s films. At the time, I had only seen the “big” Cohen films (It’s Alive, Q). I found the film to be interesting, but something felt off about the tone that […]
Well, it barely took me a week to break my promise of updating several times a week. I’ll have a new Cohen Case File posted tomorrow and I’ll be introducing a new column later in the week. In the meantime, here’s The Manic Street Preachers with Ian McCulloch (Echo!), just for the hell of it. […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen For how much he has dabbled in various genres (horror, science fiction, blaxploitation, mystery, thriller), Cohen has largely steered clear of straight forward comedies. There is plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor in films like The Stuff, Q, and his script for Maniac Cop, but for the most part, he […]
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen I’m going to spend a lot of time on this blog writing about the films of writer/producer/director Larry Cohen. Unfairly brushed aside by mainstream critics and many film historians as merely a cheesy B-movie director, his output has been admittedly uneven, but the highs far outnumber the lows […]
Obsessive Movie Nerd 