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(Cold weather classics.)
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Inferno 1980
I last watched this around eight years ago, and at the time found it to be one of my least favourite Argentos. I must have been in a bad mood at the time, because revisiting it now, it’s gone up significantly in my esteem. So naturally I went back to my old review and tried to unpack, at least for my own benefit, what my issues were at the time and why it worked better for me this time around.…
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Scanners 1981
I've seen Scanners a few times now, and with each viewing I seem to go back and forth on Stephen Lack's performance. No, I've never thought that it was actually "good", but I'm torn between whether he's a bad actor who is used well in the movie or a bad actor who deflates the centre of the movie. With this viewing, I'm leaning towards the former. To put it kindly, Lack is a limited actor, perhaps because he wasn't primarily…
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Shaolin Wooden Men 1976
Okay, this is a lot better than The Killer Meteors. Jackie plays a mute, but still has a fair amount of screen presence, and there is some irreverence and humour, if not in the same quantity and mixture as in his classics. It’s sort of interesting to see the general ambivalence towards Shaolin monks here (they treat Jackie like garbage so he bonds with their prisoner, who he then has to defeat because he’s revealed to be a bad dude),…
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Fast Company 1979
From a David Cronenberg auteurist perspective, Fast Company offers something of a challenge. On the surface, it seems totally out of place in his filmography. So many of his movies are cold and weird and scary and maybe a little sexy. But a B-movie racing drama? Where nobody turns into a car? Or attempts coitus with one? That ain't right, I tell ya what. But apparently Cronenberg holds a great amount of affection for this, as he's a bit of…
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The Long Kiss Goodnight 1996
A deeply relatable story about a schoolteacher who dyes her hair blonde and learns to kill again (not necessarily in that order), The Long Kiss Goodnight is novel in some ways for flipping the gender of the protagonist. Not that there haven't been movies about female assassins before this or since, but not quite with this dynamic. The opening scenes present a picture of total ordinariness, painted in the banal treacle of a Christmas card. When the heroine rediscovers her…
