Bad Title : Alex Garland – “Men”

A widow (Jessie Buckley) moves to a luxuriously cozy English countryside house, in writer/director Alex Garland’s Men. Soon, things go wrong, because this is all in the tradition of British folklore stories: horror situations that set Pagan religions against the relative sanity of Christianity. Witness our Eve in the garden. A naked man who looks …

Puppet Masters: Robert Morgan- “Stopmotion”

One of the oldest cinematic techniques is also one of the most magical, one of the most painstaking, and, (seems to me) one of the most unrewarding. Stop Motion Animation requires the stopping-and-starting-and-stopping-and-starting of the camera to suggest movement, usually with dolls, and preferably with creepy dolls.  I say unrewarding because I wager it is …

Girls on Girls on Girls: Riley Sager- “Final Girls”; Grady Hendrix- “The Final Girl Support Group”; Jennifer Dugan- “The Last Girls Standing”

The ridiculous tropes of the slasher film are more vivid to most thriller writers- and readers- than the less imaginative terrors of actual American crime. There are the secluded cabins in the woods, the vulnerable summer camps, all home to punishable affluence. There are borderline immortal psychopaths who prefer their penetratingly symbolic knives and harpoons and …

Can’t Spell “Deliver” Without, er, Devil: Lee Roy Kunz, Cru Ennis- “Deliver Us”

There is a profound anti-Catholic vein that runs, politely unacknowledged, through large segments of the American religious population- and its secular one too. It wasn’t too long ago that the KKK was as hatefully vitriolic about Catholicism as it was about its many, many other targets (It might still be: I proudly admit to not …

Thrice Bitten (Part 3): Pablo Larrain – “El Conde”

Pablo Larrain, Chile’s most successful director, has often turned to Chile’s most successful dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who got away with ruling for almost twenty years by “legally” rewriting the Chilean constitution so that some semblance of democracy persisted for those with the willingness to ignore reality- a condition unfortunately not endemic to Latin America. Pinochet …