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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Erotic Horror Renaissance of the 1990s: Where Cinemax Met Creature Features
Adam Page on the erotic horror renaissance of the 90s… Look, sitting here in front of this keyboard, I can’t pretend it wasn’t a weird time. The decade of the 90s was a lot of things: flannel, teen angst, the inexplicable popularity of acid washed jeans. But somewhere between the Berlin Wall being torn down […]
From Banned to Beloved: Video Nasties That Deserve Critical Re-evaluation
Adam Page delves into the world of the video nasty to see which of the controversial shockers deserve critical re-evaluation… I get it, I really do. Back when Mary Whitehouse and her gang of pearl-clutching warriors put together their list of 72 movies they deemed too dangerous for the British public in 1984, they were […]
When Horror Got Smart: An Intellectual Turn in the 90s
Adam Page on when horror got smart… I’m not going to sit here and pretend that, before the 1990s, horror was in some kind of intellectual wasteland. That would be bullshit. George A. Romero gave us pointed social commentary nicely wrapped in entrails. David Cronenberg gave us body horror as technological anxiety, and David Lynch […]
Horror in Suburbia: Why 80s Horror Was Obsessed with Middle-Class Fear
Adam Page on the 80s horror obsession with with suburbia… Horror cinema puts us in some uncomfortable places. It always has. Whether it’s digging up the freshly buried body of your child killed by a speeding tanker, or standing in the shower, soap in your eyes while you reach for a towel and find a […]
Cannibal Holocaust on Trial: When Prosecutors Thought They Found a Snuff Movie
Adam Page explores the controversy surrounding the notorious Cannibal Holocaust and the prosecution of its director Ruggero Deodato… There is a certain species of moviemaker. One who confuses provocation with profundity, who mistakes the gag reflex of the audience for proof of their artistic achievement. And then we have Ruggero Deodato, who made a movie […]
Direct-to-Video Horror: The Unsung Heroes of 90s Genre Cinema
Adam Page on the unsung heroes of horror… Obviously, I’m not going sit here and argue that Puppet Master 4 is Citizen Kane. I would insult both movies, and more importantly, I would miss the point completely. Because the direct-to-video horror boom of the 1990s wasn’t representing high art. It was something perhaps more important: […]
