Because all the pretty girls get all the pretty things, and as director Emilie Blichfeldt explores in her directorial debut THE UGLY STEPSISTER (Den stygge stesøsteren, 2025), society has always been obsessed with the outer beauty of a woman, but to what end? There's a (pardon this accidental pun) grim realization that you're just not pretty enough, and this Norwegian reimagining of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper, in a Cronenbergian body horror that…

"Have you been saying your prayers?"

Ted Bundy once said in an interview captured for the book Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer - The Death Row Interviews written by Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, while using a detailed explanation for his crimes in the third person, he described a dark intruder, a malignant force that overtook him when he stalked and killed. The interviewers noted at times Bundy's blue irises would blacken as if this entity wanted its presence…

“...they made a Prom Night 3?” people often ask, confused that the Jaime Lee Curtis incestuous 1980 slasher not only warranted a sequel, but multiple (there's a fourth as well). As if Saved by the Bell (1989-1993) did a one-off bottle episode as a supernatural slasher, Mary Lou Maloney inexplicably returns, but instead of serving c*nt, she's back like an annoying ex-girlfriend that you can get rid of. PROM NIGHT III: THE LAST KISS (1990) isn't particularly good; it's rather…

Released just weeks before DEATH WISH (1974) made Charles Bronson a revenge-seeking one-man wrecking crew that would dictate not only his popularity but his image for the rest of his career, MR. MAJESTYK (1974) finds Bronson in a similar role as Vince Majestyk, written and based on a character by famed crime novelist Elmore Leonard, a kind of timely Vetsploitation film that Nathaniel Thompson of Mondo-Digital argues “its themes of racial tension, labor disputes, and corrupt business influences resonate today…

In C.H. Newell's wonderful essay on Ti West's X (2022) in America’s Bloody Divide: The Pornography of Violence & The Religion of Capitalism in Ti West’s X, he writes “the film interrogates how America’s been divided for half a century, if not longer, by capitalism and religion, and, most importantly, how they’ve negatively affected Americans’ sociopolitical understanding and treatment of sexuality”, as the film itself is not quite what it seems on the surface. West mixes the birth of the adult…

Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER (1976) is one of those “no notes” masterpieces, a shining example of how the New Hollywood created some of the best films in American cinematic history just right before the birth of the blockbuster thanks to George Lucas. “If Mean Streets was Marty’s breakthrough, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore turned him into a Hollywood player, Taxi Driver was the movie that announced his true arrival—his induction into the hall of New American Masters”, writes A.A.…