You know you might just see dead people when you enter a bathroom lit in the aqua blue tint “The Ring”. Especially if you’re Sarah Michelle Gellar and you’ve just faced down a “Grudge” or “2″. But Gellar’s character in “The Return”, Joanna...

There has been a kind of silent rule in classic mystery fiction, from Agatha Christie to John Dickson Carr, that an author must play fair with readers and resolve their stories without resorting to the occult or speculative science. This is not an iron-clad rule, and Carr himself achieved success with...

What makes a good cover song? Different, but not too different. We still need to recognize the melody. Transformed by the cover artist’s own personal style so that the style is illuminated in relief. But not so transformed that we lose the essential power of the original. About halfway through...

There seems to be a grudge held by the media against director Takashi Shimizu for his “naked greed” in making the same damn film seven times over. It seems that it’s okay for a filmmaker to make a profit so long as it’s just collateral damage from the production of art. It also...

Lucky McKee thanks God for little girls, for without them he would have no muse, no “raison d’être” as Maurice Chevalier might have said. He would also have made no films at all since the three he’s made on his own, “May”, the “Masters of Horror” episode...

Read that title aloud. Spring. Break. Shark. Attack. It has a nice alliterative sound, a sleek look, and a “Captain Obvious” clarity only topped by “Snakes on a Plane”. Most movie titles play coy with their subjects. “The Silence of the Lambs”, for example. Now what...

Brian De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia” is quite simply the best movie to have been released so far this year. Ignore all of the cinematic philistines who have brought the collective ax down on the film with the unique rage they save for the work of this most underrated and misunderstood...

The First World War was fought with 20th century technology within a 19th century mindset, and the result of this Molotov cocktail was massive casualties on a scale never before seen or even imagined. It was also the first war to make use of the still new technology of motion pictures as a tool of both...

“Jackson County Jail” gets a revival in “Forbidden County”, the latest offering from producer David Heavener and “star” Steven Bauer. Heavener is a filmmaker whose website features ecstatic blurbs by the likes of Isaac Hayes (”Amazing! How he does it all…and...

Producer Val Lewton was the driving force behind a series of innovative B-horror movies for the RKO Studios beginning with “Cat People” in 1942, and ending with “Bedlam” in 1946. He developed a new style of horror film storytelling by presenting credible characters living and...

The myth that M. Night Shyamalan is the new Alfred Hitchcock or even the old one is something that the director himself seems eager to cultivate. It reminds me of the publicity sponsored by Brian De Palma around the time of “Dressed to Kill” appointing himself heir to the throne of Hitchcock...

It’s odd when you realize that the novels and short stories of Philip K. Dick have been adapted to the screen almost as frequently as that of Stephen King or John Grisham. Odd because, unlike the pulpier writing of both King and Grisham, Dick’s stories are quite cerebral and, in the most...

it used to be common knowledge that a first time filmmaker required a foolproof genre in order to make his first film, insuring investors on some kind of return on their gamble. The model used to be people like George Romero with “Night of the Living Dead”, Tobe Hooper with “The Texas...

Steven Soderbergh has hopes to eventually cut the studios out altogether through the emancipatory powers of digital technology. In a decidedly post post-modern way, he has remixed the electronic cinema mantra of Francis Ford Coppola and his oft repeated “dream” of a fat girl in Ohio who...

Without going into any lengthy tirade over the whole issue of remakes, I think it’s safe to say that there should at least be an honest reason for remaking an earlier film. One such reason would be that the original was a flawed or somehow failed work such as “The Amityville Horror”...