Adam Page on movies that find their audience decades on…Let me tell you about a smell, and see if it brings back memories. Carpet that has absorbed fifteen years of rain off strangers’ coats. Warm plastic. The slight chemical sweetness of a popcorn machine that nobody’s cleaned since the Falklands. A teenage clerk with a […]
“I’ll Be Back…to Kill You”: Why The Terminator is Pure Horror
Adam Page on why The Terminator is pure horror…In a previous life, I worked in the Health Service. I’ve worked in hospitals, psych wards, I’ve worked the streets at night with people you pretend don’t exist. I know how to call something what it is: The Terminator is a horror movie.It’s not an action movie […]
Out, Out, Brief Candle: Patrick Stewart, 1940-2026
Adam Page remembers the late Sir Patrick Stewart…Before he was a knight, before he was the captain, before the Royal Shakespeare Company gave him a spear and told him to stand at the back, Patrick Stewart wrote obituaries. A teenaged hack on a local Yorkshire paper. By his brother’s account, he would skive off to […]
Through the Seventh Door: Fulci’s The Beyond Still Refuses to Make Sense, And That’s the Point
Adam Page revisits Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond…And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored.Two people walk down a flight of stairs in a hospital basement and come out somewhere they can’t possibly be. It’s not the hospital, or the hotel they fled. It’s not Louisiana, not Earth, not […]
Why Exorcist II: The Heretic Is the Worst Movie Ever Made
With Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs unveiling its first trailer, Adam Page looks back at the franchise’s low point with five reasons why Exorcist II: The Heretic is the worst movie ever made…As horror fans, I think we all know the joy that comes from watching a bad movie. I don’t mean a boring one, […]
The Compromise Machine: Just What Happened with 1995’s Judge Dredd?
Adam Page looks back at 1995’s Judge Dredd…There are some failures in the world of moviemaking that don’t really announce themselves straightaway. They don’t crash the plane into the mountain. They just, quietly and incrementally, over the course of eighteen months and several hundred script pages, replace the thing you were supposed to be making […]
Basket Case vs. The Brood: Different Directors, Same Movie
Adam Page on Basket Case and The Brood…I always imagine a smell coming off a movie shot on the cheap in New York City in the early 80s. It’s a mixture of steam-pipe condensation, cigarette smoke gone deep into the drywall, and something underneath all of it that could be fear, or simply the fact […]
From Terror to Farce: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 at 40
Forty years on from its release, Adam Page revisits The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2…I’m going to start this by talking about disappointment. Real disappointment, the sort that lingers around like a broken transmission or a broken promise. It’s 1986. You’ve paid your money and settled down in the dark with nothing but your expectations, because […]
Is Natural Born Killers Actually Funny? Oliver Stone’s Savage Comedy and Why It Unsettles Us
Adam Page revisits Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers…I want to start with a theory I’ve long held about America and its relationship with its own ugliness: they love it. They love it the way a dog loves rolling in something smelly and dead; with complete and shameless abandon, every single time. Oliver Stone understood this […]
Campy on Purpose: Irony, Self-Awareness, and the Knowingly Bad Horror Movie
Adan Page on the knowingly bad horror movie…There are plenty of bad movies out there, and us online writers come to depend on them for an endless stream of material. But there is one particular type of bad movie, and I’m being careful here as I’m making an important distinction, that knows just what it […]
