Stay Hungry
A dodgy businessman (Jeff Bridges) tries to buy a gym in 1976 drama Stay Hungry, not a film so much as an answer to the trivia question: name the movie […]
Author Archives: Dan Meier
The Last Stand
This is the 2013 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, not the X-Men film with which it shares a name and magnet-based prison van escape sequence. Arnie’s post-gubernatorial comeback has a few key ingredients […]
Been So Long: My Life and Music
The autobiography of Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is now out in paperback, a book so beautiful it quite literally attracts butterflies. Been So Long charts the musician’s journey from […]
Red Heat
A Russian officer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a Chicago cop (Jim Belushi) team up to bring down a drug kingpin (Ed O’Ross) in 1988’s Red Heat. There are parallels with Rocky […]
Shivers
All this business with Dominic Cummings has got me thinking about David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Movies about viruses were spreading in the early ’70s (George A. Romero’s The Crazies and Robert […]
On iPlayer: Paint Your Wagon
Clint Eastwood heads westward in 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon AKA Purty Harry. In a possible attempt to rebottle the success of Oklahoma!, Lerner and Loewe’s (My Fair Lady) musical […]
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
As these are “unprecedented times” (by which I mean a year without Eurovision), here’s a book review: the new novel by the great horror writer Grady Hendrix, in which a […]
Collateral Damage
Arnold Schwarzenegger ends the war on drugs and starts the war on terror in this largely forgotten effort from 2002, in which a firefighter (Schwarzenegger) uses his CIA connections (?) […]
Ginger Snaps
Brigitte and Ginger (Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle) are goth sisters who spend their time hanging out in their prison cell of a bedroom, staging their own deaths for school […]
River’s Edge
The murder of a teenage girl is met with juvenile apathy and misplaced loyalty in 1986’s River’s Edge, AKA Stand By Me on crack. Loosely based on a real case […]
Screen Goblin 