Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
Wes Craven moved from New York to Los Angeles and got offered this made for television movie project starring Linda Blair based on some minor novel by Lois Duncan. Working with a real crew and real equipment, Craven made the first film in his limited body of work that feels distinctly cinematic. It's also horribly… Continue reading Stranger in Our House (or, Summer of Fear)
It took Wes Craven five years from his controversial The Last House on the Left to get his second film released, and it's obvious to me that, while he might not have become the fully mature horror filmmaker he could eventually grow into, he was becoming more assured in his ability to tell his stories… Continue reading The Hills Have Eyes
Wes Craven came up to filmmaking through the thin line between exploitation and pornography, but he was approaching even his earliest efforts with an eye towards making them more than just splatter and T&A features. He wanted to say something. However, Craven, at this age, was either too young, too inexperienced, or simply working in… Continue reading The Last House on the Left
#13 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi’s films. Originally made for Japanese television, The Fossil feels like Kobayashi leaving behind his anger at systems and confronting mortality, as does his main character. In a surprisingly close telling of a very similar tale to Kurosawa's Ikiru, Kobayashi confronts a life of workaholism that suddenly and definitively will… Continue reading The Fossil
#15 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Kobayashi continues his combination of social commentary with the remnants of his early melodramatic and dramatic work in Inn of Evil, a tale of a group of criminals at the lowest end of corruption in a corrupt society needing to deal with conflict from every side. I… Continue reading Inn of Evil
David Vining, Author 