Juneteenth is a day for celebration, reflection and resolve.
It is a significant day in our history. According to the Smithsonian, "Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army…
A werewolf-themed And Then There Were None is not a bad idea, but this movie wavers and wobbles too much to pull it off. The tempo seems wrong. The movie has flashes of cleverness, including setting the bloodletting at a release party for an online werewolf game, but the story flattens when it should intensify.
I could see this movie being successfully remade as a pitch-black comedy. It has an unusual mix of social and religious themes and its angle…
Makers of cheap movies often wink at the audience so we know they know how bad their movie is. It's just a lark. Werewolf Cabal tries that, but it doesn't help. There's no fun in this at all. What might have been a campy midnight horror is just a slog. Good grief, some of the scenes go on forever.
And the effects? The clump of hair I pulled out of my drain yesterday was scarier.
Avoid.
Cursed was produced by Miramax-Dimension and the creative team that made the first Scream movies–director Wes Craven, producer Marianne Maddalena and writer Kevin Williamson.
They wanted to bring the same style, irony and self-awareness to the werewolf movie they had brought to the slasher in Scream. Similar popularity could mean a concurrent franchise.
It didn't work. Production was a mess, the release was delayed and nobody liked the result when Cursed finally made it to theaters in winter 2005. Critics…
Director Jules Dassin could have stopped at ninety minutes and congratulated himself on making a brilliant heist movie. But the jewel theft in Rififi is just the setup for a thrilling and gut-wrenching third act that takes Rififi hard into film noir and into the canon of the greatest works of that genre.
This is an incredible movie–a perfectly judged mix of action, suspense and humor, yet darkness and gravity too.
There is so much to love in this. The…
