Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
#3 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. The first half of this story was a grand fantasy adventure that ended sadly. The second half is...an amazingly great, morally complex, and incredibly involving tragedy. I mean...I loved the first part of this large epic film, but this second part is something else. It’s not the… Continue reading Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge
This is one of those movies that I want to like more than I actually do. It addresses some of my issues with a movie monster, has some great individual sequences, but I don't think it actually comes together all that well. It's got a couple of ideas that it introduces and never explores with… Continue reading Prey
#38 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. The first Spiders movie was a relatively small and focused adventure. The second is bigger and far less focused, moving from one to location to the next in an amorphous mystery that doesn't so much escalate with increasing stakes but just kind of lurches from one thing… Continue reading The Spiders Episode 2: The Diamond Ship
#30 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. German critics were apparently dismissive of this, Fritz Lang's third feature film (and first surviving one), deriding as sensationalism and nothing more. I don't disagree, but I also don't really see much wrong with it. The narrative and thematic ambitions are modest, focused more on purely entertaining… Continue reading The Spiders Episode 1: The Golden Sea
#20 in my ranking of Wes Craven's filmography. Apparently Wes Craven took this comic book adaptation to prove a couple of things to studios: that he could work with action and that he could work with movie stars. Is it a surprise that he didn't get Batman immediately after this, a few years before Tim… Continue reading Swamp Thing
David Vining, Author 