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 […]
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 […]
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 not […]
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 was […]
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 and […]
