June 2nd, 2010
It’s in the trees! It’s coming! I knew this line from Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love long before I saw the film from which she borrowed it: Night of the Demon (1957), called Curse of the Demon in its shorter American cut. Jacques Tourneur’s eerie suspense film has become something of a cult and critical [...]
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March 23rd, 2010
In the early 20th century, crime and suspense serials were very popular with cinemagoers. They were like the 24 of the silent film era. One of the finest practitioners of the form was Louis Feuillade (1873–1925), a French writer and director of about 700 films. After the success of his Fantômas, Feuillade was encouraged to repeat [...]
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February 10th, 2010
Jean Renoir is best known for two movie masterpieces he directed in the late 1930s: La Règle du jeu, a social satire often cited as one of the best films of all time, and La Grand Illusion, a highly regarded anti-war film. The latter was infamously described by Joseph Goebbels as “cinematic public enemy no.1”, [...]
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January 20th, 2010
This week’s cult film recommendation is Matango, a little-known Japanese oddity from 1963. You might imagine from its full American title, Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People, that it’s a daft and trashy piece of work. Contrary to appearances, though, this is an unusually well-made and thoughtful genre film. It plays by the rules of [...]
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January 9th, 2010
The Galway Film Society has announced its winter/spring season for the new year. As usual, the films will be screened at the Town Hall Theatre [map]. Titles and dates are as follows: Séraphine (17 Jan.), Home (24 Jan.), Mid August Lunch (31 Jan.), Welcome (07 Feb.), Tales from a Golden Age (14 Feb.), Bright Star [...]
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November 27th, 2009
Jimmy Wang Yu’s outrageous martial arts film from 1975 is something of a cult classic. I re-watched it recently and can happily report that it’s as over the top and crazily entertaining as ever. This fight scene — between the one-armed boxer (Wang Yu) and a yoga master with an unexpected special power — is [...]
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October 26th, 2009
“It’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.” John Carpenter’s The Thing was released in 1982, but I saw it first in the mid-1990s. It hooked me right away. The opening caption: Antarctica, Winter 1982; and the scene: a helicopter chasing a dog, its passenger shooting at the animal sprinting across the empty snow towards [...]
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October 19th, 2009
Instead of keeping up to date with the latest offerings from the world of cinema, I have been catching up on a crime serial from its early days. Fantômas is a criminal mastermind who originated in a flurry of 32 detective novels published monthly between 1911 and 1913; the first film adaptation, directed by Louis [...]
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October 1st, 2009
Here’s another recommendation from the 2007 vault. This film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, is a very different sort to the last one I wrote about on Culch.ie. RTE recently broadcast it in a late-night slot (23 September), and although I didn’t re-watch it then, I got to thinking about it again – [...]
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September 16th, 2009
‘I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, “Hi, I see that you’re good at Centipede”‘ – Walter Day (Note: this piece has no substantial plot spoilers, but some of the links do.) Right after I saw The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters for the first time, I went googling. I [...]
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August 27th, 2009
When Culch.ie said they wanted “fresh blood” for the site, I knew immediately that I wanted to write something for them about horror films. In an email to Darren I whimsically proposed, among other things, a piece about refrigerator-based horror. Not cal-horrific psychological snack-horror à la Bridget Jones, but full-on cinematic horror, featuring refrigerators. As [...]
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