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 […]
The Best Worst Movie: How Showgirls Became Camp Canon
Adam Page revisits Showgirls and its journey from catastrophe to camp classic….Over the years, I’ve realised something about failure, especially with bad movies, that I think we can all agree on: it has a shelf life, and if you’re patient enough, lucky enough, and if enough strangers laugh at the wreckage in the same room […]
The Longest Leap: Quantum Leap’s Ending is Still a Gut-Punch Thirty Years On
Adam Page on the gut-punch of Quantum Leap’s infamous finale…There are endings, and then there are endings. There are those wrapped neatly with a little bow, a kiss in the sunset, the hero walks away from the frame and everyone is alive, smiling and all properly accounted for. Television, and in particular American network television […]
J-Horror and the Western Gaze: When Asian Horror Invaded the 90s
Adam Page on the J-horror popularity explosion of the late 90s and its impact on Hollywood…I know I’m starting this with a generalisation, but there is an odd sort of arrogance that comes with being American. It’s not malicious, it’s more of a quiet, deeply held assumption that the best ideas of the world will […]
The TV Shows That Dared To Be Complex Before Complexity Was Allowed
Adam Page on the pioneering TV shows that dared to be complex before complexity was allowed…I want to talk about something that I think a lot of people have either forgotten about the nineties or, if you’re of a younger age, just aren’t aware of. I’m not talking about the glossy, Friends-sofa, Central Perk version […]
Peak Paranoia: Why David Cronenberg’s 80s Body Horror Movies Are More Relevant Than Ever
Adam Page on why David Cronenberg’s 80s body horror movies are more relevant than ever…There is a famous scene in Videodrome (1983) where James Woods reaches into his own stomach. Not through it, into it. His torso has opened up, quietly and without drama like a VHS slot, and he slips his hand inside and […]
David Cronenberg’s The Fly at 40: A Love Letter to the Rot
Adam Page on David Cronenberg’s sci-fi body horror classic The Fly…There is a moment in The Fly from David Cronenberg, and if you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading, go watch it and come back, I’ll wait. Okay, then? It’s where Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle pulls off his fingernail. Just…lifts it away clean to show […]
