Come Visit Filmofile’s Hideout

The Driller Killer is a priceless artifact from New York City in the 1970s. It’s a rich nugget of cinema that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not the plot, it certainly isn’t the acting, it’s something harder to express. It’s the sound and texture. …

I’m guessing Rene Cardona’s Santa Claus was intended to be a children’s film, but the lessons it teaches are questionable at best. It’s a Mexican production from 1959. In Cardona’s version of Christmas lore, Santa lives in a castle floating on a cloud in outer space. I know it’s just…

Pornography directors and producers are human, too. Somewhere under the cocaine, booze, and semen-drenched misogyny, they have a psyche that is vulnerable to the same shocks and anxieties that we all have. Rollerbabies, made by Carter Stevens in 1976, is a frantic outburst of these fears writ large. Rollerbabies is…

Somewhere in the mess of images I just sat through is a movie… probably. There’s no discernible plot or meaning, but there was a lot of color, movement, blood, and smoke. Portrait In Crystal is a Shaw Brothers production, but not one of their typical kung fu epics, it’s one…

Ron Ormond’s The Exotic Ones AKA The Monster And The Stripper opens with what I affectionately call the “point and look montage.“ It’s a common trope in both low-budget and blockbuster films. In The Exotic Ones, the montage begins with a man in a bad wig paddling in his canoe…

Sextet is a stupid movie, so stupid it overlooks its own misogyny and forgets to hide it behind a veil of prurience. Nudie cuties aren’t supposed to be much of anything but a chance to see women’s mammary glands, but Sextet stumbles into all kinds of charged territory as it…

Megazone 23 is laser-focused on its target market. Everything about the film is carefully arranged to appeal to what I would guess is a 15-year-old boy. You have your motorcycles, robots, stylish clothes, pretty girls, and lots and lots of hair! The film is like one long shampoo ad. …

I have seen four films that were shot in one take: Victoria, Russian Ark, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, and now Shahram Mokri’s Fish and Cat. Each of the four films has its own reason for using such a challenging technique, but Fish and Cat is different…

The 1974 film Shriek Of The Mutilated begins with a series of drawings that document the existence of a Yeti, or at least a high school stoner’s doodles of something hairy. As we peruse the renderings, a disembodied voice explains the frightening facts about the Yeti and how it most…