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Grave Secrets 1989
Not bad, but not that good either. Barely middling? Regardless, you'll wish Darla was your personal assistant too.
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Nightmare in Badham County 1976
I haven't yelled "KILL THE PIG!" more during a movie than this one.
Best "Women in Prison" film ever.
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Sleepless 2001
You'd think a 21st Century giallo comeback by Dario Argento would be worthwhile, but then you'd have to remember the kind of filmmaker he had become and the rapid decline that followed.
It's Argento's TV movie with brutal kills and nothing else. Every quintessentially "giallic" ingredient manifests in uninspired form. The whole thing lacks the little redeemable bits of his lesser, yet watchable, films: insanity (The Stendhal Syndrome), a little class and craft (Opera), absurdity (The Mother of Tears), and…
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Promising Young Woman 2020
Not bad! It's a genre film that dabbles in "the discourse," but in a darkly comical manner. However, it's incredibly on the nose, more than a movie should be. It's like an Ayn Rand novel that doesn't roll my eyes. As it traffics tropes—nothing fundamentally wrong about that—in service of ideas, it lacks drama and suspense.
But I did appreciate that it contextualized what appear to be REAL quotes—for example, the title seems like an obvious reference to a statement…
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Primitives 1978
A faithful knock-off of Italian cannibal movies that feels more "mondo" and sequential when the violence and barbarity take hold of the narrative. Fortunately, it has that familiar East Asian genre film touch: physics and reality defying action sequences. Most memorably, a boomerang stone club. I want one.
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Hitcher in the Dark 1989
I wonder, how many Italian-made Americanized genre films feature people in RVs watching the CAVEMAN-exploiter GRUNT (1983)?
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