The Deepest Cuts: C.H.U.D. (1984)

The Deepest Cuts is a weekly invitation into some of the sleaziest, goriest, most under-explored corners of horror and cult film online. Every title will be streamable and totally NSFW. Whether it’s a 1960s grindhouse masterpiece, something schlocky from the 90s, or hardcore horror from around the world, these films are guaranteed to shock, disturb, tickle, or generally blow your mind.

A gnarly green claw reaching up and pushing aside a manhole cover. A fluke-like, decomposing face glimpsed in the reflection of a quarantine mask. A flash of bared teeth – sharp, fang-like chompers. These are the Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers (C.H.U.D.), living beneath the streets of Manhattan, thriving in the dank waste of modern society. And as long as they’re staying deep underground, attacking only the city’s least-wanted, it’s of little concern to city officials; but as the film’s opening demonstrates, the C.H.U.D.s are hungry, and they’re coming for average, above-ground citizens – and their little dogs, too. And, they’re awesome.

Director Face/Off: Wes Anderson Vs. Richard Linklater (Part Five – Their Other Stuff)

July 7, 2015 by Lillian Angelle Posted in Retrospectives Tagged Director Face/Off, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Hotel Chevalier, Richard Linklater, Up to Speed, Waking Life, Wes Anderson 1 Comment

Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater –prominent writer/directors, Texas natives (both have roots in Houston) and coincidentally my two favorite humans. Their latest films were nominated for Best Motion Picture this year and, delving further, their careers have evolved at very similar rates, humbly paving the quaint dirt road that was the indie film scene in the ‘90s with Slacker and Bottle Rocket. Onward, they transitioned to tastemakers, acquiring cult followings with Dazed and Confused and The Royal Tenenbaums. With each film Anderson and Linklater make, their toolbox gets a little bigger without compromising their eclectic and pridefully offbeat styles, one vastly different from the other, yet hauntingly similar. Which leads to the question, who does it better?

In past Face/Offs, we’ve pitted directors Anderson and Linklater against each other, comparing their very best films, their tried-and-true indie gems. This week we’re taking a slight departure from the directors’ most known work, to their little known work, or at least less known. In this final installment to pit Anderson against Linklater, we ask “Who does other stuff better?” Read More

The Deepest Cuts: THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (1969)

July 1, 2015 by Madelyn Sutton Posted in Retrospectives Tagged Leonard Kastle, Martin Scorcese, Shirley Stoler, The Deepest Cuts, The Honeymoon Killers, True Crime Leave a comment

“The incredibly shocking drama you are about to see is perhaps the most bizarre episode in the annals of American crime. The unbelievable events depicted are based on newspaper accounts and court records. This is a true story.”

The solemnity of this opening title card suggests that the ensuing film will be serious – a true crime exposé, an episode of 60 Minutes. Do not be misled. Premiering in 1969, at the beginning of the New Hollywood era, in which independent, international, and schlock (from the likes of American International Pictures) films were emerging as a critical force in the world of cinema, The Honeymoon Killers is hardly a news-channel-appropriate treatment. Shot in the stark black and white of the era’s arthouse films and starring soon-to-be cult-movie stars Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco (in their first onscreen roles), it’s a compulsively watchable, disturbing combination of devastating violence and dark comedy.
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Director Face/Off: Wes Anderson Vs. Richard Linklater (Part Four – Memorable Quotes)

June 30, 2015 by Lillian Angelle Posted in Retrospectives Tagged Boyhood, Dazed and Confused, Director Face/Off, Richard Linklater, Rushmore, School of Rock, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums 2 Comments

Wes Anderson’s oh-so-deadpan characters spout off some wise, sometimes just straight up madcap tidings, whereas Linklater’s characters go for the gold with philosophical revelations even too deep for Tiny Buddha, and one-liners that end up on t-shirts. Let’s compare the two directors’ most memorable quotes.

Battle 4: Memorable Quotes

Round One:

“That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”
Linklater – Dazed and Confused

“Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone’s *not* a genius? Do you especially think I’m *not* a genius? You didn’t even have to think about it, did you?”
Anderson – The Royal Tenenbaums

In Dazed and Confused, David Wooderson is a grown-up loser who still hangs out with high school kids. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Eli is a self-absorbed author of western books and also an endearing stalker who hangs out in closets wearing only his underwear. His prose is truly hilarious, as we discover when he reads an excerpt at a press conference: “And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight . . .” Both memorable characters, but Wooderson’s wacky wisdom lives on forever in frat houses across the world.

Winner: Linklater/ Dazed and Confused

Round Two:

“I have been touched by your kids… and I’m pretty sure that I’ve touched them.”
Linklater – School of Rock
“I’ve never seen so many electric jellyfish in all my life!”
Anderson – The Life Aquatic

Both School of Rock and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou have ample amounts of hilarious, memorable quotes. Nothing beats that awkward moment at the parent-teacher conference when Dewey Finn says that perverted quote without even realizing. Ned Plimpton, in his nasally, southern accent-y voice, declares his quotes in a state of enamored fascination. Quotability, in my opinion, is based on if you can shout an obscure quote at a dinner party totally out of context and have people laugh, rather than stare are you questioningly.

Winner: Anderson/ The Life Aquatic

Round Three:

“You know how everyone’s always saying seize the moment? I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around, you know, like the moment seizes us.”
Linklater – Boyhood

“I saved Latin. What did you ever do?”
Anderson – Rushmore

Linklater’s most recent coming of age opus Boyhood is ripe with wisdom and heartfelt realizations. So is Anderson’s Rushmore, which follows a confused kid as he gets caught up in an obsession with a teacher at his school. I could be biased here, since I’ve been quoting Rushmore avidly for years, but there is just so much angst-filled honesty in Max Fischer, such vulnerable truth.

Winner: Anderson/ Rushmore

Subjective Winner: Wes Anderson’s Quotes are Better

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Join us next week for the next Wes/Dick showdown and check out prior segments:

Battle #1: Reuse of Actors
Battle #2: Locations
Battle #3: Music

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A Century of Skin: Nudity’s Eruption into American Cinema

June 29, 2015 by Jill Landon Posted in Film Editorials Tagged Carmencita, Diary of a Nudist, Magic Mike XXL, Nudist Land, Sign of the Cross Leave a comment

With Magic Mike XXL (our review here), America’s favorite male stripper sequel, hitting theaters on July 1st, we break down just how nudity has become so ingratiated with American cinematic norms. From the barely provocative titillation of the late 1800s (mmmm, ankles) to Channing Tatum wagging his shtick (sadly, not in 3D), we ask how we’ve come so far and wonder how hard the journey has been.

Nudity has been a part of American cinema for over a century. When motion picture cameras were invented, they were immediately used to film people taking off their clothes. Many early films featuring male and female nudity have been completely lost. Early films with nudity were destroyed or censored. More often, like other films of this era, early films with nudity simply chemically disintegrated over time. Read More

Camera Obscura: DARK CITY

June 27, 2015 by Eric Brown Posted in Retrospectives Tagged Alex Proyas, Dark City, Kiefer Sutherland, Rufus Sewell, William Hurt 2 Comments

Camera Obscura: (Latin: “dark chamber”) is an optical device that led to photography and the photographic camera. The following films penetrate the modern psyche through an all too clear lens–its iterations, ethos, phobias, catharsis, and moreover, crisis. With stunning clarity, these masters peered into a void and showed us the contemporaneous man in all of its conflicting form before our eyes.

Every time I read or watch narrative subject matter about modern life, I’m reminded, like others, of our former observers’ clarity. Yes, they had unstoppable imaginations lit on fire, but as fantasy bleeds into reality it’s the warnings that leave a knot. We know they’re there, but our modes of modern catharsis are only synthetic and soon we won’t know what’s real and what’s not. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) doesn’t know, violently waking supine in a water-filled bathtub as a dingy ceiling light undulates above. More so, he awakens with no memory to an Art Deco nightmare where, in the words of “The Strangers”, “All times and no times are blended together.” Read More

The Deepest Cuts: NIGHTBREED (1990)

June 26, 2015 by Madelyn Sutton Posted in Retrospectives Tagged Clive Barker, Nightbreed, The Deepest Cuts 1 Comment

Though vampire and zombie movies have seen a major revival in popularity in recent years, “monster movies” of the sort exemplified in early genre titles like The Blob or The Creature of the Black Lagoon are a much rarer find. Nightbreed, writer/director Clive Barker’s second feature film, is like a monster movie on steroids. And where recent films like Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods treat horror-movie monsters with humor and irony, the creatures of Nightbreed are not fucking around. This combination of unrestrained imagination and genuine horror make Nightbreed a completely unique and compulsively watchable film. Read More

Director Face/Off: Wes Anderson Vs. Richard Linklater (Part Three – Music)

June 23, 2015 by Lillian Angelle Posted in Retrospectives 3 Comments

Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater –prominent writer/directors, Texas natives (both have roots in Houston) and coincidentally my two favorite humans. Their latest films were nominated for Best Motion Picture this year and, delving further, their careers have evolved at very similar rates, humbly paving the quaint dirt road that was the indie film scene in the ‘90s with Slacker and Bottle Rocket. Onward, they transitioned to tastemakers, acquiring cult followings with Dazed and Confused and The Royal Tenenbaums. With each film Anderson and Linklater make, their toolbox gets a little bigger without compromising their eclectic and pridefully offbeat styles, one vastly different from the other, yet hauntingly similar. Which leads to the question, who does it better?

For Anderson and Linklater, a film’s soundtrack seems to be equally as important as cinematography or plot. Anderson uses music to form a specifically cultured aesthetic shaped from a balance of scores by Mark Mothersbaugh and rock ‘n’ roll. Linklater uses era-defining music as a sort of bookmark for time, shaping his stories around cultural happenings as defined by what was playing on the radio.

The Deepest Cuts: FRANKENHOOKER

June 12, 2015 by Madelyn Sutton Posted in Retrospectives Tagged Frank Henenlotter, Frankenhooker, James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, The Deepest Cuts Leave a comment

Sci-fi and horror nerds are championing the return of a certain much-beloved low-budget aesthetic heralded by the success of George Miller’s newest installment in the Mad Max franchise, Fury Road, and in the use of practical effects in evidence in trailers for the upcoming Star Wars episode. In the case of the latter film, this reliance on puppets and robots represents a return to the ethos of episodes IV-VI – but one needn’t go back as far as 1977 to see actors interacting with real objects in the same physical space for the sake of thrills. Read More

Director Face/Off: Anderson vs. Linklater (Round One – Reusing Actors)

June 11, 2015 by Lillian Angelle Posted in Retrospectives Tagged Bottle Rocket, Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater, Slacker, The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson 1 Comment

Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater –prominent writer/directors, Texas natives (both have roots in Houston) and coincidentally my two favorite humans. Their latest films were nominated for Best Motion Picture this year and, delving further, their careers have evolved at very similar rates, humbly paving the quaint dirt road that was the indie film scene in the ‘90s with Slacker and Bottle Rocket. Onward, they transitioned to tastemakers, acquiring cult followings with Dazed and Confused and The Royal Tenenbaums. With each film Anderson and Linklater make, their toolbox gets a little bigger without compromising their eclectic and pridefully offbeat styles, one vastly different from the other, yet hauntingly similar. Which leads to the question, who does it better?