Category: Rants

There’s an extraordinary scene at the end of the pretty good 1981 slasher Eyes of a Stranger in which Jennifer Jason Leigh’s blind deaf-mute character has just regained her sight after being sexually assaulted and beaten in her home by a serial killer. The teenager has managed to turn the tables and shoot the vicious…

The least conspicuous turd in Batman Returns (1992) I think I’m on record disliking superhero movies. No, hating them. In Batman Returns I’m supposed to buy into a deformed dwarf crime boss having been raised by penguins in a sewer. Oh, and the dowdy, timid secretary Michelle Pfeiffer is pushed out of a high window…

A mainstream pat on the back in A View to a Kill (1985) Not too many actors get to play a Bond megalomaniac, but Walken was happy to dye his hair blonde and give things a whirl. Did he do a good job? Hmm, well, he’s Max Zorin, the product of some WW2 Nazi experimentation…

By 1991 Christopher Walken was a major star, having secured a place in pop culture with his Oscar-winning Deer Hunter turn. Yet watch him drift through that year’s little-seen All-American Murder clad in a leather jacket and a fixed expression and you have to wonder what the fuck’s going on. Surely an actor of such…

2022 has been a banner year for celebrities setting themselves on fire. We had Will Smith’s career-ending stupidity at the Oscars and the never-ending story of the world’s richest fool, Elon Musk. As always, being an election year, there were a whole slew of Trump worshiping nitwits who all went down in a blaze of…

A hundred years ago the gentleman detective in the form of Philo Vance was extremely popular. The crimes he solved tended to be artificial and complex. The hard-boiled detective in the form of Sam Spade and the Continental Op were a reaction to this artificiality. Raymond Chandler wrote The Simple Art of Murder in reaction).…

Scorsese’s cinematic partnership with De Niro is among the most legendary of the twentieth century, hemorrhaging up blood-soaked classics like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. It wasn’t all plain slaying, though. Just take a look at the headache-inducing musical New York, New York in which De Niro argues nonstop with Liza Minnelli. Then there’s the redundant,…

Some people think Die Hard is a Christmas movie and I’m not here to contradict them though it’s in my every bone to do so, it’s Christmas, we should get along, somebody somewhere invented the idea that it was rude to ask these people exactly what the analytical criteria for a Christmas movie might be,…