Who’da thunk it? Meir Zarchi’s lurid-but-staggeringly-effective 1978 rape-revenge thriller I Spit On Your Grave (or Day Of The Woman, if you prefer) was panned as being prurient and offensive trash at the time of its release, but is now widely considered (and rightly, in my view) to be quite possibly the most overtly feminist horror film ever made. Time makes fools of us all, I suppose, and the critics who trashed Zarchi’s flick back in the day are definitely a prime example of this old adage. But the wholesale reconsideration of the original isn’t the surprising wrinkle I’m talking about here.

No, the reason I said “who’da thunk it?” is because nearly 40 years later, I Spit On Your Grave has become a veritable straight-to-video franchise. The 2010 remake had its flaws, to be sure, and the 2013 “thematic” sequel had even more of them (how, exactly…

The comics and animation worlds are reeling today with the announcement of the loss of Darwyn Cooke. At only 54 years of age, it’s a good-bye far too soon, and represents something of a “double-whammy” coming just a day after news of his fight with a very aggressive form of cancer had gone public. In a world where the term “visionary talent” is criminally overused, Cooke was exactly that, and reading through the many tributes to the man posted on social media by various comics creators, it’s uncanny how much they resemble the tone and substance of what many musicians had to say in the wake of Prince’s still-shocking passing a couple of weeks ago, essentially : he was the best of us.

Cooke’s first foray into the world of comics was a brief one, with his artist’s “by-line” adorning a short story in DC’s New Talent Showcase #19 in…

Writing reviews of these Marvel flicks really ought to be fairly easy at this point since they can more or less all be summed up with “if you like this sort of thing, then you’ll like this one, too” — and while that’s as true as ever in the case of the just-released Captain America : Civil War, there’s plenty on offer here worth commenting on in a bit more depth, much of which isn’t taking place on the screen at all. So let’s dive into that first, shall we?

Make no mistake — the latest entry into the so-called “MCU” had a big opening weekend and looks set to make its parent company plenty of money. But a number of box office websites projected it to do considerably more business right out of the gate, and keep in mind that those figures are usually adjusted downwards thanks to…

Let’s be brutally honest — there’s always been something kind of fucked up about Batman, hasn’t there?

Mind you,  I say this as someone who loves that character and still reads both major “Bat-books” religiously every month, but come on — here’s a guy with all the money in the world and a deep desire to right all of society’s wrongs, and what does he do? Goes after common street criminals, most of whom are probably both poor and desperate. Meanwhile, the rich are robbing us all blind to a degree most of us can’t even conceive of, and when we complain about it even just a little bit, the wusses at the top of the economic food chain — the ones who own the entire media, the entire political system, and frankly the entire world — these lily-livered, gutless scumbags in $5,000 suits or even more expensive cocktail dresses…

I’m taking a step back from classic films for a moment to talk with all my fellow bloggers. In my “real” life, I have a job as program director of Network House in New Bedford, MA. It’s part of the Veteran’s Transition House, and a ten bed program for civilians suffering from homelessness and substance abuse. Network House has helped hundreds of people get their lives back on track since it’s inception in 1998.

But no more. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has decided to stop funding transitional programs and go with Housing First, designed to put people directly into permanent housing situations. They feel this is the best way to go, and we, along with other transitional programs, have been defunded as of 4/30/16.

But for the nine men currently residing at Network House, they now have nowhere to go. They came to us directly from detoxes…

Waaaaayyy back in my early days as an armchair critic, I focused almost exclusively on exploitation, horror, and other “B”-movie genres. They’re pretty much all I wrote about, in fact, and calling my blog “Trash Film Guru” made a kind of sense back then. These days, of course, I find myself casting my hopefully-more-sharply-trained critical eye on just about anything, and if I went back and added up the numbers over the last two or three years I’d probably find that I’ve reviewed just as many comics as I have films, and that I’ve reviewed as many Hollywood blockbusters, documentaries, foreign films, and straight-to-video numbers as I have old-school (or, for that matter, new-school) exploitation flicks, but still — the “Trash Film Guru” name continues to run at the top of my site, and since it does, I take it as almost a personal responsibility to review new Quentin Tarantino…

When a new comic series comes along touting itself as being “like Wes Anderson remaking Reservoir Dogs,” I’m bound to be intrigued — if for no other reason than the fact that I absolutely despise Wes Anderson every bit as much as I love Quentin Tarantino. As a result, writer Matthew Rosenberg and artist Tyler Boss’ new five-parter from Black Mask Studios, 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank, had my attention from the outset — but was going to be on a very short leash. If it proved to be a fun, foul-mouthed crime caper with a ’70s exploitation vibe, then I’d be in for the duration. But if it played out like a self-consciously “quirky” story loaded down with bright primary colors and a nauseating “rich people are nothing but harmless ‘big kids’ who never grew up and pal around with deadpan mute sidekicks from the Indian…

Who are we kidding? You know damn well what the score is going into any flick called Navy Seals Vs. Zombies — it’s going to be a low-budget action/horror hybrid with as smattering of D-list “stars,” crummy effects, atrocious dialogue, poorly-staged fight sequences, risible acting, and no real point to it.

And to be sure, director Stanton Barrett’s straight-to-video 2015 might-as-well-be-an-Asylum-film has all of that —errrmmmm — going for it. But somehow it manages to pull off the seemingly- impossible task of being both exactly what you expect it to be, as well as something far worse.

When I saw this one added to the horror movie queue on Netflix recently (it’s also available on Blu-ray and DVD from what I gather but, as I’m sure it goes without saying already, you needn’t bother) under its alternate title of Navy Seals : Battle For New Orleans (although it was filmed…