The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story
I always assumed that catching bits of Naked Jungle would be the TV memory that scarred me to the day I gratefully died, until I sat through The People v. […]
Author Archives: Dan Meier
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Set during the Great Depression, 1985’s The Purple Rose of Cairo finds Cecilia (Mia Farrow) disenchanted with her abusive husband and crummy waitressing job but enchanted by the movies. During her […]
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend
This is my first taste of Netflix’s interactive offerings, apart from the “skip politics” button inexplicably included in a stand-up special from political comedian Seth Meyers. It didn’t work – […]
As Good as Dead
The eminently torturable Cary Elwes is targeted by neo-Nazis in Jonathan Mossek’s As Good as Dead. This thankless thriller opened on a single screen in 2010, back when Nazism was […]
Saw II
The franchise with the world’s shortest average shot length continues with this Poundland staple from 2005, and this time the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell) has 8 people trapped in a […]
Saw
In terms of lockdown movies, it doesn’t get much more locked down than Saw: two men (Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell) wake up chained to pipes in the kind of […]
The Purge: Anarchy
The second chapter in The Purge series finds us in 2023, when Purge night (the annual 12-hour event when all crime is legal) has saved the economy. Because apparently the […]
Michael (1996)
There’s something fundamentally creepy and slightly sad about Hollywood’s obsession with angels meddling in human affairs – whether it’s Clarence showing George Bailey the dark timeline where his wife becomes […]
Toolbox Murders (2004)
In an act of cultural cannibalism, Tobe Hooper remakes 1978 video nasty The Toolbox Murders which was itself a ripoff of Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Talk about scraping the […]
Thirst
As the pubs reopen, we turn to the South Korean story of a Catholic priest (Parasite‘s Song Kang-ho) who contracts a vampiric disease and starts drinking as though the blood […]
Screen Goblin 