close
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20101007204735/http://www.notcoming.com:80/
September 30th at Midnight

Reviews & Features

Boxing Gym

Boxing Gym
07 Oct, 4:16 PM

For many in R. Lord’s Boxing Gym, training is an end in itself, promoting strength, endurance, and balance. For others, it serves as a way of negotiating pain and cultivating self-respect. For still others, it is a means of pedagogy, of educating children and adults alike in the ethics of self-reliance, control, morality, and perseverance. What boxing, for the most part, is not — at least within the heavily padded and postered walls of Lord’s gym — is a form of violence. If anything, it is a way of forestalling or channeling the energies of violence; more often, it is a way of avoiding it.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comment

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
07 Oct, 12:25 AM

31 Days of Horror – When Christopher Lee’s Dracula gazes upon the supple nape of one of his victims, he has this paradoxical tenderness, so capable in his seduction that not one of them makes even a meager attempt to dissuade him. It’s only moments after he enters that, to the viewer, he’s no more feared than anyone else in the film; rather, he’s so absolutely charismatic that the scenes without him exist to nourish a suspense in seeing him again.

Review by Rumsey Taylor  /  Comment

Red Line 7000

Red Line 7000
06 Oct, 12:54 PM

Howard Hawks strategically positions men and women as flipsides of the same professional coin, necessary opposites that invariably push extreme mechanisms of work forward. In Red Line 7000, his late career mash-up of race car thrills and melodramatic spills, Hawks shows there are consistently casualties within this dynamic. Some are physical and others emotional, but each gets an extravagant presentation. As a prolonged montage of car crashes, conversations, and break-ups, Red Line 7000 moves to a different beat than most Hollywood films, taking in the sudden shifts of tone by lingering on moments between climaxes of all kinds. In that sense, it’s the quintessential anti-action film.

Review by Glenn Heath Jr.  /  Comment

Zombi 2

Zombi 2
06 Oct, 3:43 AM

31 Days of Horror – The films of Lucio Fulci’s creative and artistic zenith offer nothing in the way of catharsis for audiences, as is the standard for the horror genre, and instead constantly return to a concept of death as inescapable and inevitable. There are no heroes, no villains, only mortals trapped in a supernatural world beyond their comprehension and from which they are unable to escape. These films serve as a metaphoric beginning and end to Fulci’s descent into the darkness. Zombi 2 is the beginning of sundown.

Review by David Carter  /  Comment

Brain Dead

Brain Dead
05 Oct, 3:06 AM

31 Days of Horror – From the vagrant, apparently suffering from Tourette Syndrome, who sees Dr. Martin carrying a jarred brain across the parking lot and begins screaming (“That’s my brain! That’s my fucking brain!”), to Dr. Martin’s deranged social interaction over dinner (“I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you about me, but I’m a purple people… a person pimple… a people person, there we go”), Brain Dead is filled with an abrupt and unanticipated absurdity that can also seem symptomatic of a deeper malaise.

Review by Jonathan Foltz  /  Comment

I’m Still Here

I’m Still Here
04 Oct, 3:33 PM

The idea of perception — of who Joaquin Phoenix is or should be — is at the root of whatever the film is presenting: his disintegration? His performance art case-in-point? It’s unclear, at times unbearable and often uninteresting. You can’t stop watching, but that doesn’t mean you care.

Review by Rod Bastanmehr  /  Comment

Dying Room Only

Dying Room Only
04 Oct, 12:42 AM

31 Days of Horror – Inescapable oppression is writer Richard Matheson’s stock-in-trade. From the airplane-destroying gremlin in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet to the faceless truck driver in Duel, Matheson’s protagonists often find themselves hounded and driven to the brink of insanity by inscrutable enemies. A key factor to the success of Matheson’s scenarios is that his characters are regularly compelled to face these impossible evils alone, without anyone to assist them, and, more importantly, without anyone believing that anything is wrong in the first place.

Review by Thomas Scalzo  /  Comments (2)

Scream

Scream
03 Oct, 2:04 AM

31 Days of Horror – Horror villains are monstrous parental stand-ins, brutally punishing young people – and especially young women – for their perceived misdeeds, sexual and otherwise. This stuff is lurking beneath the surface of every good (and bad) Halloween knockoff worth its Karo syrup, but with Scream, Kevin Williamson forcibly dragged his genre’s subtext into the text itself, and allowed his characters to audibly interrogate it—and then willfully revise it.

Review by Victoria Large  /  Comments (1)

The Ninth Configuration

The Ninth Configuration
02 Oct, 2:40 AM

31 Days of Horror – Ten years prior to The Exorcist III, Blatty had donned the title of director for the first time with The Ninth Configuration, based on his novel of the same name. And while the unexpected third installment of The Exorcist is often viewed as Blatty’s sole contribution to horror cinema, it’s his directorial genesis – a brutal, exhausting, and sadly overlooked cult classic based around a makeshift mental hospital in the Pacific Northwest – that exemplifies his underutilized skills as a filmmaker.

Review by Adam Balz  /  Comment

The Thin Blue Line

The Thin Blue Line
01 Oct, 1:50 AM

31 Days of Horror — Few films have provoked real fear in me—not the low-hanging fruit of shock or repulsion but closer to what H.P. Lovecraft termed ‘cosmic fear,’ or “a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” But The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary about a man convicted of a crime he did not commit, is among the handful that have shaken me to my core and kept me up at night immobilized in paralytic terror. It’s absurd to suggest that The Thin Blue Line belongs to the horror genre. But its depiction of a close-knit community’s drive to avenge the death of a police officer, even though it meant sending an innocent man to his death, induced in me the sort of destabilizing chills I’ve always expected to feel in the wake of traditional horror films.

Review by Matthew Derby  /  Comment

Screening Log

Recent Comments