Random viewing, short takes

Sennia Nanua gives a riveting performance as Melanie, The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016)

A decidedly mixed bag of recent viewing; a pair of young adult zombie stories — the Maze Runner Trilogy (2014-18) and the small-scale The Girl with All the Gifts (2016); a taut ’50s prison escape noir (Crashout, 1955) and a polished new crime noir (Dragged Across Concrete, 2018); a minor, dull thriller (All the Devil’s Men, 2018); and a bloated, enervatingly pretentious remake of a genre classic (Suspiria, 2018).

An evening with ’50s monsters

... and the mantis meets a traditional end amidst the trappings of urban civilization in Nathan Juran's The Deadly Mantis (1957)

Blu-ray technology is lavished on a pair of cheap 1950s sci-fi/horror movies with Shout! Factory’s The Deadly Mantis (1957) and Kino Lorber’s The Maze (1953), the latter is superbly restored 3D. Both movies get informative commentaries and other extras – and both probably never looked this good even in their original theatrical releases.

More late winter viewing, part one

Be scared or laugh? Walking alien slime mold in Kinji Fukasaku's The Green Slime (1968)

Entertainment knows no bounds in terms of style or quality: recent viewing ranges from Walter Hill’s gripping Vietnam allegory Southern Comfort (1981) to Kinji Fukusaku’s pulp sci-fi The Green Slime (1968), from Richard Franklin’s Ozploitation horror Patrick (1978) to Robert Amram’s perplexing End Times “documentary” The Late Great Planet Earth (1979).

Blasts from the past

Zatoichi, still incomplete

Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, cinema verite and the problem of “actuality”

Video Nasties Revisted

One of these things is not like the others

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