The month of May was packed full of high-grossing box office hits, but the opening week was most notable for a stylish low-key comedy with a big heart. Based on a crime novel by Chester Himes, Bill Duke’s Rage In Harlem is a touching tale about an ingenuous churchgoer named Jackson (Forest Whitaker), who wins the heart of a salacious female grifter (Robin Givens) after becoming a key component in her latest con […]
When any sort of new technology is made available for public consumption, there’s a portion of the population that will resist it and a portion that will embrace it wholeheartedly.
Consumers of video games are no different in this regard. 1991 was a couple of years into the 16-bit revolution thanks to home consoles such as the Turbografx-16/PC Engine and the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, but there was still a portion of the population clinging to their 8-bit NES […]
Blast processing. Sega had it, Nintendo didn’t. I had no idea what it was and most other kids didn’t either.
Of course, we now know it was a made up term used by the Sega marketing department, but that didn’t matter to us in 1991. All we knew was that there was this blue hedgehog named Sonic spinning around loop-the-loops and blazing around the screen at speeds unseen before. Commercials don’t lie, right? […]
Almost thirty years have passed since the release of John Singleton’s controversial drama, and the movie has lost none of its power. In fact, it is hard to imagine a film of its nature existing in today’s censored climate […]
Samurai Cop is the movie Loaded Weapon 1 should have been.
It is so gloriously bad in its intricacies that spoof writers must have been fearing for their jobs, or at the very least taking notes. Some movies are so wonderfully irregular that it is impossible to convey their qualities in a way that befits them […]
The hardest movie to make is a sequel.
First of all, if a sequel has been put into production it is because it’s predecessor struck a note with the theatre-going public, and this is typically an indication that the movie was good, perhaps even great.
In 1984, James Cameron’s The Terminator gave us perhaps the greatest sci-fi character of the decade. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Cyberdyne Systems Model […]
For a brief period during the early ’90s I longed to be Vanilla Ice.
I remember turning up to school discos wearing ridiculous baggy pants and brightly-coloured sweatshirts, doing my utmost to imitate his bodacious dance moves while wondering just how he got his hair to stay like that. Sometimes I would dream of bursting into the school hall and wowing the ladies with my hip moves and colourful charisma. It’s amazing what a classic Queen riff and a well-oiled corporate think tank can do to an impressionable young mind […]
For visionary independent filmmakers the biggest drawback to making mainstream movies are the studio sacrifices.
Wes Craven had been there before prior to horror/comedy The People Under the Stairs, which, for a movie with an 18 certificate, is an incredibly hokey affair. In 1984 the director would be forced into a sequel-setting finale for his ethereal, low-budget triumph A Nightmare on Elm Street, a decision which led to perhaps the most successful horror franchise in history […]
