tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-792821913215826362026-03-29T17:35:49.712+01:00A film and TV blog devoted to the latest releases in Horror, Cult, Archive, Vintage and ArthouseBlack Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-5882904048642932082019-12-09T20:18:00.001+00:002019-12-09T20:26:25.698+00:00

Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into The World), the second major surviving landmark picture in the development of Horror cinema during the silent era, emerged from the Weimar Republic’s German Expressionist school of film-making in 1920. It appeared less than a year after Robert Wiene’s ground-breaking Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari had first

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-75201213414555184952019-06-15T14:40:00.000+01:002019-06-15T14:40:46.566+01:00

A sombre mood of loneliness and overwhelming isolation hangs heavy over the succession of almost indistinguishable landscape images which open cinematographer Erik Bloomberg’s 1952 directorial debut: a proto-folk horror cum ethnographic fairy-tale from Finland called The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura). The scene is set immediately: we are in Lapland; the ‘present day'. As the opening

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-34414856180918021902019-04-28T19:59:00.001+01:002019-04-28T20:07:41.548+01:00

When asked by the acclaimed Hungarian-born production designer Alexandre Trauner to explain his latest project in a single sentence, Billy Wilder pithily summed up what turned out to be the most financially profitable movie of his career, Irma La Douce, as “the story of a man who is jealous of himself”. This almost facetiously paradoxical prescription applies to a film that, if one were to be

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-68554101067645117222019-03-31T14:53:00.000+01:002019-03-31T15:06:28.077+01:00

Fritz Lang’s hugely under-appreciated movie from the latter half of his career, Human Desire, seems in general not to rank highly with film scholars and has never been considered one of the Austrian-German-American filmmaker’s finest works. It was released to an indifferent box office response by Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures in 1954, and clearly wasn’t the follow-up to The Big Heat (made for

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-68273786327730196822019-02-24T14:32:00.001+00:002019-02-24T14:32:50.107+00:00

Cocteau’s 1950 masterpiece Orphée interweaves poetic myth with photo-realism, historical and biographical detail with a playful invention, and early 20th-century avant-garde practice with techniques originally designed to facilitate the tropes of popular entertainment cinema. It does this so smoothly, and without apparently expending any effort on the process, that the act of watching or

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-48078805098302640462019-02-10T17:37:00.002+00:002019-02-10T17:46:41.952+00:00

Now available in the UK on the Screenbound label, Crucible Of The Vampire is director/writer/editor Iain Ross-McNamee’s second full-length feature. It cleverly utilises the topography of a bucolic Shropshire landscape as well as the history behind the manor house used as the film’s primary shooting location, in order to evoke beautifully the golden era of British horror. But the film is a

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-78704868799192011232019-01-28T11:37:00.000+00:002019-01-28T11:42:49.672+00:00

Robert Aldrich’s 1962 horror thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? single-handedly spawned the psycho-biddy subgenre by successfully blurring the thin line already dividing the gossip column-generating heat of off-screen rivalries indulged at the time -- largely for publicity purposes -- by its two ageing Hollywood stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and the murderous, co-dependent animus

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-22113150082492589292019-01-13T12:07:00.000+00:002019-01-13T12:18:25.622+00:00

The 1944 Hollywood movie Laura plays for the most part as if it were a conscious postmodern deconstruction of film noir character types and motifs despite the fact that the term "film noir" did not become available for use until years after this acknowledged classic of the subgenre had been released. This is surely the biggest consequence of the fact that the  source novel and

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-56996591748165729642018-12-10T11:56:00.000+00:002018-12-10T12:28:56.608+00:00

Although writer-director Fred Walton often cites as inspiration for the opening segment of his seminal suspense thriller When a Stanger Calls (1979) an infamous true crime murder case that took place in Columbia, Missouri during the 1950s, it’s actually the 1960s urban legend the story later spawned that is being so skilfully wrung for maximum scare potential in those tense first twenty

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-36513281780648217632018-10-31T14:49:00.000+00:002018-10-31T14:49:57.788+00:00

Charles Band created Empire International Pictures to facilitate the independent production and theatrical distribution of many distinctive horror films and science fiction and fantasy pictures, which were made throughout the middle period of the 1980s, usually containing a large dollop of comedy at their core -- the intention being to exploit the emerging home VHS market. After Luca

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-22679512850613138152018-10-16T12:18:00.000+01:002018-10-16T12:18:01.371+01:00

It’s hard to think of another film you could show someone today that conveys the direction popular mainstream horror cinema was going during the 80s as well as Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps. Released to very little fanfare back in 1986, Dekker’s big studio debut feature has since become a minor cult classic, and is still probably the most memorable piece of work in what has turned out to

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-1445627643461468862018-10-14T15:46:00.000+01:002018-10-14T15:46:50.939+01:00

Monkey Shines was the first feature to put George A. Romero in the director’s seat as a hired hand on a fully-fledged non-independent studio-backed production. Inspired by a pulp novel written by Michael Stewart, it was initially mooted for adaptation by independent producer Peter Grunwald, who proposed it as an investment opportunity for the American entrepreneur and sometime-producer Charles

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-35782803169675050122018-09-10T17:34:00.000+01:002018-09-10T17:34:45.795+01:00

Allure is the cinematic debut of Canadian photographic artists Carlos and Jason Sanchez, working here as a fully-fledged feature writer-and-directer team.  The brothers design images for their gallery-exhibited photographic work that function within photojournalistic parameters covering natural disasters or human interest stories that one might find in a glossy magazine. In fact, the

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-13971854309090546602018-08-09T12:07:00.001+01:002018-08-09T12:09:18.563+01:00

The Old Dark House is a striking, lavishly mounted pre-code oddity from the early years of producer Carl Laemmie Jr’s cycle of horror classics made in the 1930s at Universal City in Los Angeles. It saw the British director-abroad James Whale return to the genre that has since come to define his reputation not long after attempting to escape its gravity-like pull with a little-remembered drama

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-36635520073882478682018-06-03T15:16:00.002+01:002018-06-03T15:16:28.992+01:00

When the boom in Japanese horror took off in the West during the early 2000s it apparently arrived fully formed, attracting attention largely on the back of the landmark statement made at the time by Hideo Nakato’s Ringu, its various sequels and offshoots, and the franchise created with Takashi Shimizu’s extensive roster of Ju-On (Grudge) movies. But, from very early on in the critical

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-83867734503051403002018-05-16T10:34:00.000+01:002018-05-19T14:46:11.778+01:00

One of the things I hope for when reviewing the new Blu-ray and DVD releases is finding that what has dropped through the letterbox is a previously unsuspected perfect masterpiece that I hadn’t been aware of before. Legend of the Mountain is a film that falls into exactly that rare, much-appreciated category. It is an extraordinary fantasy-horror epic, made by wuxia supremo King Hu

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-65621933318361713122018-03-17T14:51:00.000+00:002018-04-13T17:33:50.820+01:00

Back in the year 2000, Tak Sakaguchi became a notable new star of Asian cinema thanks to a vibrant, low-budget zombie-Sci-Fi-action-gore flick called Versus, which burst upon an international genre distribution scene that was, at the time, hungry for all things Japanese in origin. Its director, Ryûhei Kitamura, discovered in his good-looking young choice of lead-actor, not only martial arts

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-1335123801953500932018-02-17T17:14:00.000+00:002018-04-13T18:02:19.896+01:00

It is no surprise that colonialism should have such an important role to play as the thematic lynchpin in Derek Nguyen’s debut feature The Housemaid (Cô Haû Gaí). The film, set in Vietnam in 1953 during the French Indochina War, positions itself as a traditional Gothic romance, a genre with many established literary antecedents in the 19th century that set a textual precedent for dealing with

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-36515522752500780902018-02-03T11:53:00.001+00:002018-02-04T10:16:25.440+00:00

 At one point during the final act of Árpád Sopsits’s extremely grim, murkily-lit, based-on-true-events thriller Strangled (A Martfüi Rém), soul-crushed lifer Réti Ákos (Gábor Jászberényi), who has been languishing in jail for the rape and murder of a former girlfriend after his death sentence got commuted to life imprisonment, is marched from his dank prison cell and deposited before

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-82727921922932493352018-01-10T20:21:00.000+00:002018-01-10T20:41:34.162+00:00

Kills on Wheels is a re-naming for English markets of a film, the second from Hungarian writer-director Attila Till, whose original Hungarian title, Tiszta Szívvel, translates as Pure Heart. A comedy action-drama that actually has heart, and is entirely character-based, is a rare thing in of itself, but, as is being foregrounded much more prominently by the English title than by the film’s

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Der Müde Tod (The Weary Death), aka Destiny, considered Fritz Lang’s first great German masterpiece of the silent movie era by many, also marked the beginnings of a new chapter in the development of his cinematic career. In retrospect, it can be seen as the overture to a portentous phase in German film culture that looked, in the early-1920s -- at least as far as the rest of Europe was

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-46963669955801881762017-09-30T18:33:00.000+01:002017-10-01T10:56:36.809+01:00

In films such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and the Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel-directed Man Bites Dog, filmmaking itself becomes implicated as a dangerous tool that promotes and enables murder for voyeuristic psychopaths who use it to procure their victims, while exposing the prurience of the gaze of not just the amoral antagonists of these films, but of us -- the viewers at home -- who

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-18920659803775220232017-09-24T14:04:00.000+01:002017-10-01T10:51:57.002+01:00

WARNING: This review contains spoilers throughout Christian Marnham’s tawdry offbeat thriller The Orchard End Murder furnishes audiences with a curious viewing experience in 2017 for a number of reasons, not least of which being the fact that – uniquely for a film of its kind -- it presents us with a very particular (and rather twisted) outlook on a mid-1960s milieu filtered through a lens

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-34144817736906638662017-07-23T11:13:00.001+01:002017-07-23T11:13:07.287+01:00

Between 1946 and 1964, the great iconoclastic Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900 – 1983) found himself, like many of his contemporaries during the Spanish Civil War, living and working in Mexico, where he was able to resume his directorial career and make at least twenty films in a variety of genres while working to tight schedules and with extremely low budgets for producer

Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-76381966464331424592017-07-06T16:11:00.000+01:002017-07-22T14:28:06.843+01:00

The silent German film classic Varieté is a torrid, melodramatic tale of family betrayal, infidelity, sexual obsession and moral intrigue that was released to great acclaim and success in 1925. It takes place against a big city backdrop of ribald and often Rabelaisian film sounds and sights encompassing the worlds of carnival, vaudeville, theatrical entertainment and stage performance - mostly

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