The Big Boss established several rules for making a great Bruce Lee movie, mostly by getting them wrong.
The number one rule, which should have been obvious, would be to make Bruce Lee the focus of the movie. The second rule would be letting Bruce Lee do what he did best, be a cool motherf’er. The third rule: let Bruce Lee do a lot of fighting. While it is impossible to keep Bruce from being cool, The Big Boss fumbles on rules 1 and 3 […]
The film that puts the “uh??” back in Canuxploitation
Much like the titular character in Cathy’s Curse, the home that begot the film put its very soul at risk. The Canadian government, aiming to jumpstart the country’s fledgling cinema scene in the 1970’s, instituted an enormous tax credit for any production of a feature film in the country. While this paved the way for the likes of David Cronenberg, Ivan Reitman, and Bob Clark, it also opened the floodgates to the seediest of American producers and Hollywood outcasts looking to abuse the tax haven […]
What was it about Bruce Lee that made him the eternal icon of action cinema?
He wasn’t the first star of the kung fu wave. Shaw Brothers Studio had been steadily churning out heroic martial arts fantasy flicks years before Lee got into the game, and cheaply dubbed versions were already showing up in American grindhouse theaters. He certainly was one of the most talented and innovative martial artists in history, but that alone doesn’t explain it, either. I break it down to something simpler: Bruce Lee was the coolest son of a bitch ever to walk the Earth. He was so cool that both Steve McQueen and James Coburn were […]
Some films have such an influence on you it can feel like there was never a time in your life that you hadn’t seen it; you’d been born knowing its nuances and meanings, almost like a parent in the way it helped to form your beliefs.
I’m sure I’m not the only one for whom Jaws was their first experience in true terror. After its release, a whole generation of kids were suddenly petrified of going into the sea […]
Before Roger Ebert started using his opposable thumbs to give films the old pollice verso, he was putting them to typewriter as a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times—oh, and scripting this banger of a surprise satire for 20th Century Fox alongside the breast man in the business, Russ Meyer […]
For some, Dario Argento’s first venture into the realms of the supernatural is an exercise in style-over-substance.
For one thing, there is no real plot to speak of, and the action seems peripheral at times, while the makeshift manner in which the film’s music stops and starts seems loose to the extent where you may find yourself questioning the editing. But that is precisely the point. Suspiria’s aim is not to provide us with some kind of familiar narrative; quite the opposite, in fact […]
If the 1960’s gave birth to civil rights, then the following decade provided the fallout.
By the time the Vietnam War came to an end in 1975, the counterculture movement had all but dissolved, but American society had changed irrevocably, giving birth to a generation with different beliefs and aspirations. Citizens were unwilling to advocate war based on patriotism alone, and for many the Catholic church would become an outmoded burden […]
John Carpenter’s Halloween was guilty of a great many crimes.
So successful was his low-budget revelation that it spawned an entire decade of sleazy, half-baked imitators, movies so devoid of technical competence that the genre had no other option than to descend into self-parody. Fortunately, for those of us with a taste for the unthinkably inept, lots of those movies have found a special place in our hearts […]
