4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films is just what it says it is, 4 (or more) shots from 4 (or more) of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 (or more) Shots From 4 (or more) Films lets the visuals do the talking
Today, we pay tribute to experimental surrealist and horror director, Curtis Harrington! It’s time for….
4 Shots from 4 Curtis Harrington Films
Night Tide (1961, dir by Curtis Harrington, DP: Vilis Lapenieks)
Queen of Blood (1966, dir by Curtis Harrington, DP: Vilis Lapenieks)
The Killing Kind (1973, dir by Curtis Harrington, DP: Mario Tosi)
The Dead Don’t Die (1975, dir by Curtis Harrington DP: James Crabe)
Today’s horror scene that I love comes from the 1911 film, L’Inferno. This silent film is not only considered to be the first Italian feature film but it was also the first Italian horror film. Based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, the film took three years to make and was a hit with audiences. It made two million at the box office, an unheard of amount of money in 1911.
In this scene, Dante and Virgil observe the devil eating a sinner’s soul.
It looks like Sony released a trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, starring Kaya Scodelario (Crawl) as Claire Redfield, Avan Jogia (Starz’ Now Apocalypse) as Leon Kennedy, Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp) as Jill Valentine, Robbie Amell (The Babysitter) as Chris Redfield, Tom Hooper (The Umbrella Society) as Albert Wesker and Lily Gao as Ada Wong (Kin).
Director Johannes Roberts (The Strangers) looks like he’s bringing in elements from Capcom’s Resident Evil remake (originating back in 2002 on the Nintendo Gamecube), as well as Resident Evil 2. We have Lisa Trevor from the original and William Birkin (played by Band of Brothers & Ravenous‘ Neal McDonough), though it seems to be more of a mashup.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City premieres in Theatres on November 24th.
Any way you slice it, saving the world has got to be a raw deal. I mean, let’s say you’ve got super-powers and can do that sort of thing — is there really any way you’re ever gonna get the thanks you deserve?
The Ditko-esque figure of the brave hero who saves a person/city/planet only to silently watch, powerless, as his own life either gets no better or in some way becomes appreciably worse is, of course, a shop-worn trope by now, but it remains an alluring one for cartoonists to deploy. I mean, pathos doesn’t get much simpler or more unsubtle — or more effective. Consider the ultimate example, Spider-Man : after Ditko’s departure, when the character of Peter Parker became a much more standard-issue “good guy” who saved the day, got the girls, and exuded so much confidence it was tempting to think he’d forgotten all about his…
On tonight’s episode of Friday the 13th: The Series, Ryan is convinced that an old comic book monster has come to life and is now killing people! Could it all be connected to a cursed pen that was sold to the creator of the comic book?
Watch and find out!
Tonight’s special guest star is Ray Walston, who played embittered comic book creator Jay Star. From what I’ve recently learned about how the comic book industry treats its artists and writers, I can’t really blame him for being bitter.
There’s no polite way to say this, and perhaps as an outsider I’m not even terribly qualified to opine on the matter anyway, but rest assured the following sentiment is shared by millions : the state of Texas appears to be a very troubled — and, in many respects, troubling — place.
I say this fully cognizant of the fact that my own home state of Minnesota has come in for its fair share of negative headlines over the past year-plus, but when a “perfect storm” of lax safety and building regulations, a laughably substandard power grid, and hollowed-out social services budgets did more damage to the people of the Lone Star State than the natural storm that literally hit it earlier this year did, the rest of the nation — and even the rest of the world — became acutely aware of the reality that something was seriously…
For a guy who prides himself on being “in the know” about all things small press and self-published, sometimes it’s downright frightening to discover how much can still pass by my notice. I mean, I’m not arrogant enough to assume that everyone making anything worthwhile automatically knows they should send their wares in my direction, but most days my mailbox is full enough that it certainly feels as if that might be the case.
That being said, it’s still inarguably true that a cartoonist has to be “plugged in” to a certain degree to even know who the fuck I am in the first place, and one of the best things about Gerald Jablonski’s comics is how utterly divorced they are not just from the current state of the comics “scene” but from any and all forms of convention in a general sense. The overly-dense page layouts, the way overly-dense…
“The Deal” works on two levels: Art and Reality. The story is about selling your soul. What the Adversary is really offering is a do-over with life on cheat mode. This story was directed by Daniel Kaminsky and written by Will Strouse, but Will only got credit on IMDB, not in the film credits. Why is it that only the director’s career took off and Will Strouse was erased? What did the Director do in Hollywood before this break? He’d never really directed or written anything, but now he’s the Executive Producer of The Nevers on HBO. How did he get such luck? For the better part of a decade, Daniel Kaminsky was the assistant to Joss Whedon. In fact, he was his assistant for all the Marvel movies and tv and this was while Joss was purportedly up to his worst behavior. Daniel Kaminsky did not intend for this, but the short rings like a confessional for his own Faustian deal. This short was the first payday for Daniel’s deal because Joss was the executive producer.
To be fair, I’ve argued before that many many many of our greatest artists were terrible human beings- EG Picasso. Both Joss and Picasso, were notorious misogynists, but brilliant. I loved Buffy and pretty much everything Joss did, except Dollhouse which was terrible. It could be that artists need more of a community of regular people to be better behaved? Perhaps Hollywood doesn’t provide the limits that some creatives need to keep from falling into the abyss. We could do a housing program where we re-settle artists to Peoria, Des Moines, and Pittsburgh; not to be mean, just to keep them a little more grounded.
Back to selling your soul, unlike Picasso, Joss took an apprentice who likely saw him at his worst and knew how to keep the secrets. Dramatization below:
Joss hires Daniel
The Deal shows a former Prom King and Queen, Bryce and Monica, who have fallen into a post-high school slump. They are going to a party being held by the former nerd James; he used to do magic, his sister Becca used to be obese, but both are now rich and thin. In fact, everyone at the party has obvious success despite their purported mediocrity, which we learn from the exposition nuggets. One exposition nugget was from Hector, who was Bryce’s high school friend and got Bryce’s scholarship when Bryce suffered a car accident.
The party continues and we learn that Monica really wanted to be an actress and then we lose track of her. Bryce can’t track her down either. He enters James’ room and she’s not there and Bryce starts to lose it and search everywhere for Monica. Finally, James’ reveals his black demon-eyes and we learn that everyone there made a deal. In fact, Monica was about to make a deal, using her body as a trade. This was a very Harvey Weinstein moment. Bryce accidentally kills Monica and James made her disappear from existence. No one remembers her. In the end, Bryce doesn’t either.
Monica’s disappearance also fits with what Weinstein and Whedon did to people who crossed them!
When you do something terrible, the greatest deal would be to have it erased from all time. But like any deal with the Devil, there’s collateral damage: Bryce’s injury so Hector could succeed or Monica because Bryce chose himself.
This story rings so real because it was just six months after this short was released that all of the Kingpins started to fall: Weinstein, Lauer, Rose, CK, and eventually Joss himself. Maybe some deals have fine print? This short is creepy, but not for the writing or directing.
Corinne Halbert’s work is the sort of stuff that lends itself well to deep and thoughtful metatextual analyses that will or would, I’m fully confident, place it firmly within the now-chic, if ill-defined, body of “sex positive” art, embodying as it does an ethos that not only responds to, but frankly obliterates, such contemporary (and, really, timeless) villains like patriarchy, kink-shaming, modesty, repression, and other shit most people of discernment are bored with. Throw in some noble pro-drug — specifically pro-psychedelic — sentiments, and there’s really no doubt about it : Halbert follows in the rich tradition of those who both preach and practice William Blake’s famous axiom “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
And so it is that I truly hope a dedicated, skilled, and analytical writer will take it upon themselves to situate Halbert’s entire ouevre within a much broader continuum of like-minded aesthetic…
Running a gamut of garishness and ghoulishness from the grotesque to the giddy, it’s tempting to say that Jim Blanchard’s splendidly-produced mini Primitiva (Noreah/Brownfield, 2019) is something of a “sampler” of the artist’s wares — and while there’s no denying that it is, there’s also more to it than that. And while it’s admittedly not the long-form showcase afforded to the artist by Fantagraphics in books such as Visual Abuse or Meat Warp, that’s not necessarily a strike against it : in fact, the selection of acrylic and ink drawings herein seems hand-selected for its ability to really jump off these slick, glossy, high-production-value pages, which means the aesthetic focus here is —at least somewhat tight?
I realize full well that the beginning and ending of the preceding paragraph contradict each other, but let’s just go with it all the same, because deliriously contradictory (even self-contradictory) imagery has…
Through the Shattered Lens 