Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim is one of those films that has all the ingredients for greatness, an eerie premise, shadow-drenched cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, and a mystery steeped in paranoia, yet somehow manages to feel oddly inert. At just 71 minutes, it should move like a sharp little shocker, but instead it wanders, circling…
Tag: horror
Maximum Overdrive (1986) – Review
Stephen King on cocaine, a Hollywood budget, and the unshakable belief that everything is scarier when it explodes, that’s Maximum Overdrive in a nutshell. Based on his own short story, this is less a faithful adaptation and more a caffeinated fever dream on wheels, where trucks, vending machines, and even homicidal hair-dryer cords decide humanity’s…
Duel (1971) – Review
Before Jaws, before Jurassic Park, before Spielberg was the patron saint of summer blockbusters, he made a film that proved you don’t need a giant shark or prehistoric monsters to terrify an audience, all you need is a faceless truck, a stretch of desert highway, and the nerve to keep the camera rolling as it…
Lifeforce (1985) – Review
There are movies you watch and think, “Wow, that was tight, coherent, and thematically rich.” And then there’s Lifeforce, a movie where you watch a fully nude space woman suck people’s souls out through their faces, and you think, “What in the actual hell is going on, and why am I kind of into it?”
Queen of Blood (1966) – Review
Let’s say you’re a low-budget filmmaker in the mid-60s, you love weird horror, and you’ve just gotten your hands on some cool Soviet sci-fi footage, stuff that looks a hundred times more expensive than anything you can shoot in California. What do you do? If you’re Curtis Harrington, you spin that into Queen of Blood,…