Posts by Robert Ring

Sporting one of my favorite movie titles ever, Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace is a prime example of the Italian horror genre known as giallo. Gialli (the plural form of the word) are basically stylized mystery/horror films containing occasional scenes of intense violence. They are often marked by unnatural yet strangely intriguing lighting techniques. Naturally, gialli tend to become efforts in creating a moving atmosphere. Trying to uncover a secret can only take a film so far, but offering stimulating color use and set design along the way can provide a good boost, depending on what you look for in a film. Blood and Black Lace is light on story but rich in style.(read more...)

Watching the first moments of A Bucket of Blood, viewers might be confused as to whether they should laugh at it or with it. The film starts at a beat club where a pompous hipster named Maxwell is reciting awful poetry that is actually more like dramatic soapbox ranting. “I will talk to you of art. For there is nothing else to talk about. For there is nothing else,” he says. Go ahead and laugh with no guilt, though, because it is soon becomes impossible for the film not to realize its own humor, even though it never accentuates it. A Bucket of Blood does not take many risks, but it is a fun horror flick about bad artists and worse art.(read more...)

Snakes are scary. Planes are scary. Therefore, snakes + plane = double scary. Right? The premise sounds like simple genius. The movie, however, is just simplistic.

The content of the film does stay true to the title Snakes on a Plane. You get just what you sign up for. The overarching plot is not really important to the experience of the movie, so I won’t get into that. Just know that it’s Samuel L. Jackson trying to save the day on a plane practically bombed with, as he puts it, “snakes on crack.” Yeah, I know: How can you go wrong with that premise? The movie ends up doing what would seem impossible for a snake + plane flick: it takes itself seriously.(read more...)

"I have been hurt by others. And I will hurt them. I will make them suffer like I have suffered." Thus begins The Sadist, horror cinema's best-kept secret. After Charlie's opening lines, a narrator (uncredited producer Arch Hall, Sr., actually) speaks for a moment. He explains the goal of sadists: "to inflict moral insanity on the innocent," and that is exactly what the film itself does. It takes three epitomical Americans -- middle-class teachers on their way to a baseball game -- and utterly destroys them. And there's nothing that can be done about it.(read more...)