All posts by JonesyTheCat

Ponder for a moment the curious case of Cuba Gooding Jr. In 1991 he gives a standout performance in John Singleton’s powerful drama Boyz in the Hood. This raises his profile significantly, helping him to secure decent parts in large box office successes such as the Tom Cruise star vehicle A Few Good Men. [...]

Ambition is important, without it there would be no rocket ships, no brain surgery, no Ulsysses, no Sistine Chapel and certainly no mint chocolate chip ice cream. However, at a certain point ambition becomes delusion. [...]

“Sick of waiting for EVIL DEAD 4? Check out DAMNED BY DAWN.” It’s telling that the cover art features that rather cocksure proclamation. [...]

W[Delta]Z, Martyrs, Hostel II, 7 Days… All movies that have sought, in some capacity or another, to expand on the torture film formula, experimenting with the clichés that plague the genre and subverting audience expectation. [...]

Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 feature, Possession became another victim of the Video Recordings act orchestrated by Mary Whitehouse and was banned in the United Kingdom for over a decade. Censorship rules aside, this injustice is particularly upsetting as it is a film that far transcends the caste of the ‘video nasty’. [...]

Black Christmas is notorious. It unwittingly became the blueprint for the slasher subgenre, pioneering the use of its two main devices; that of protracted POV (point of view) shots (á la Lady in the Lake) and menacing phone calls from an unidentified psycho killer ‘qu’est-ce que c’est?’ It inspired John Carpenter to make Halloween, thus [...]