tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-792821913215826362024-03-05T06:40:45.706+00:00Nothing But The Night!A film and TV blog devoted to the latest releases in Horror, Cult, Archive, Vintage and ArthouseBlack Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-5882904048642932082019-12-09T20:18:00.001+00:002019-12-09T20:26:25.698+00:00DER GOLEM (1920)
Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie
er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into The World), the second major
surviving landmark picture in the development of Horror cinema during the silent era, emerged from
the Weimar Republic’s German Expressionist school of film-making in 1920. It appeared less than a year after Robert Wiene’s
ground-breaking Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari had first Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-75201213414555184952019-06-15T14:40:00.000+01:002019-06-15T14:40:46.566+01:00THE WHITE REINDEER (1952)
A sombre mood of loneliness
and overwhelming isolation hangs heavy over the succession of almost
indistinguishable landscape images which open cinematographer Erik Bloomberg’s
1952 directorial debut: a proto-folk horror cum ethnographic fairy-tale from Finland called The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura).
The scene is set immediately: we are in Lapland; the ‘present day'. As the opening Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-34414856180918021902019-04-28T19:59:00.001+01:002019-04-28T20:07:41.548+01:00IRMA LA DOUCE (1963)
When asked by the acclaimed
Hungarian-born production designer Alexandre Trauner to explain his latest
project in a single sentence, Billy Wilder pithily summed up what turned out to
be the most financially profitable movie of his career, Irma La Douce, as “the
story of a man who is jealous of himself”. This almost facetiously paradoxical
prescription applies to a film that, if one were to beBlack Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-68554101067645117222019-03-31T14:53:00.000+01:002019-03-31T15:06:28.077+01:00HUMAN DESIRE (1954)
Fritz Lang’s hugely under-appreciated movie from the latter half of his career, Human Desire, seems in general not to rank highly with film scholars and has never been considered one of the Austrian-German-American filmmaker’s finest works. It was released to an indifferent box office response by Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures in 1954, and clearly wasn’t the follow-up to The Big Heat (made forBlack Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-68273786327730196822019-02-24T14:32:00.001+00:002019-02-24T14:32:50.107+00:00 ORPHÉE (1950)
Cocteau’s 1950 masterpiece Orphée interweaves poetic myth with photo-realism, historical and biographical detail with a playful invention, and early 20th-century avant-garde practice with techniques originally designed to facilitate the tropes of popular entertainment cinema. It does this so smoothly, and without apparently expending any effort on the process, that the act of watching or Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-48078805098302640462019-02-10T17:37:00.002+00:002019-02-10T17:46:41.952+00:00CRUCIBLE OF THE VAMPIRE (2019)
Now available in the UK on the Screenbound label, Crucible Of The Vampire is director/writer/editor Iain Ross-McNamee’s second full-length feature. It cleverly utilises the topography of a bucolic Shropshire landscape as well as the history behind the manor house used as the film’s primary shooting location, in order to evoke beautifully the golden era of British horror. But the film is a Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-78704868799192011232019-01-28T11:37:00.000+00:002019-01-28T11:42:49.672+00:00HUSH ... HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964)
Robert Aldrich’s 1962 horror thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? single-handedly spawned the psycho-biddy subgenre by successfully blurring the thin line already dividing the gossip column-generating heat of off-screen rivalries indulged at the time -- largely for publicity purposes -- by its two ageing Hollywood stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and the murderous, co-dependent animusBlack Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-22113150082492589292019-01-13T12:07:00.000+00:002019-01-13T12:18:25.622+00:00Blu-ray Review: LAURA (1944)
The 1944 Hollywood movie Laura plays for the most part as if it were a conscious postmodern deconstruction of film noir character types and motifs despite the fact that the term "film noir" did not become available for use until years after this acknowledged classic of the subgenre had been released. This is surely the biggest consequence of the fact that the source novel and Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-56996591748165729642018-12-10T11:56:00.000+00:002018-12-10T12:28:56.608+00:00BLU-RAY REVIEW: When a Stranger Calls (1979) Limited Edition
Although writer-director Fred Walton often cites as inspiration for the opening segment of his seminal suspense thriller When a Stanger Calls (1979) an infamous true crime murder case that took place in Columbia, Missouri during the 1950s, it’s actually the 1960s urban legend the story later spawned that is being so skilfully wrung for maximum scare potential in those tense first twenty Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-36513281780648217632018-10-31T14:49:00.000+00:002018-10-31T14:49:57.788+00:00TROLL: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION (1986/1990)
Charles Band created Empire International Pictures to facilitate the independent production and theatrical distribution of many distinctive horror films and science fiction and fantasy pictures, which were made throughout the middle period of the 1980s, usually containing a large dollop of comedy at their core -- the intention being to exploit the emerging home VHS market. After Luca Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-22679512850613138152018-10-16T12:18:00.000+01:002018-10-16T12:18:01.371+01:00NIGHT OF THE CREEPS (1986)
It’s hard to think of another film you could show someone today that conveys the direction popular mainstream horror cinema was going during the 80s as well as Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps. Released to very little fanfare back in 1986, Dekker’s big studio debut feature has since become a minor cult classic, and is still probably the most memorable piece of work in what has turned out to Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-1445627643461468862018-10-14T15:46:00.000+01:002018-10-14T15:46:50.939+01:00MONKEY SHINES (1988)
Monkey Shines was the first feature to put George A. Romero in the director’s seat as a hired hand on a fully-fledged non-independent studio-backed production. Inspired by a pulp novel written by Michael Stewart, it was initially mooted for adaptation by independent producer Peter Grunwald, who proposed it as an investment opportunity for the American entrepreneur and sometime-producer CharlesBlack Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-35782803169675050122018-09-10T17:34:00.000+01:002018-09-10T17:34:45.795+01:00ALLURE (2017)
Allure is the cinematic debut of Canadian photographic artists Carlos and Jason Sanchez, working here as a fully-fledged feature writer-and-directer team. The brothers design images for their gallery-exhibited photographic work that function within photojournalistic parameters covering natural disasters or human interest stories that one might find in a glossy magazine. In fact, the Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-13971854309090546602018-08-09T12:07:00.001+01:002018-08-09T12:09:18.563+01:00The Old Dark House (1932)
The Old Dark House is a striking, lavishly mounted pre-code oddity from the early years of producer Carl Laemmie Jr’s cycle of horror classics made in the 1930s at Universal City in Los Angeles. It saw the British director-abroad James Whale return to the genre that has since come to define his reputation not long after attempting to escape its gravity-like pull with a little-remembered drama Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-36635520073882478682018-06-03T15:16:00.002+01:002018-06-03T15:16:28.992+01:00CURE (1997)
When the boom in Japanese horror took off in the West during the early 2000s it apparently arrived fully formed, attracting attention largely on the back of the landmark statement made at the time by Hideo Nakato’s Ringu, its various sequels and offshoots, and the franchise created with Takashi Shimizu’s extensive roster of Ju-On (Grudge) movies. But, from very early on in the critical Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-83867734503051403002018-05-16T10:34:00.000+01:002018-05-19T14:46:11.778+01:00LEGEND OF THE MOUNTAIN (1979)
One of the things I hope for when reviewing the new Blu-ray and DVD releases is finding that what has dropped through the letterbox is a previously unsuspected perfect masterpiece that I hadn’t been aware of before. Legend of the Mountain is a film that falls into exactly that rare, much-appreciated category. It is an extraordinary fantasy-horror epic, made by wuxia supremo King Hu Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-65621933318361713122018-03-17T14:51:00.000+00:002018-04-13T17:33:50.820+01:00RE:BORN (2016)
Back in the year 2000, Tak Sakaguchi became a notable new star of Asian cinema thanks to a vibrant, low-budget zombie-Sci-Fi-action-gore flick called Versus, which burst upon an international genre distribution scene that was, at the time, hungry for all things Japanese in origin. Its director, Ryûhei Kitamura, discovered in his good-looking young choice of lead-actor, not only martial arts Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-1335123801953500932018-02-17T17:14:00.000+00:002018-04-13T18:02:19.896+01:00THE HOUSEMAID (2016)
It is no surprise that colonialism should have such an important role to play as the thematic lynchpin in Derek Nguyen’s debut feature The Housemaid (Cô Haû Gaí). The film, set in Vietnam in 1953 during the French Indochina War, positions itself as a traditional Gothic romance, a genre with many established literary antecedents in the 19th century that set a textual precedent for dealing with Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-36515522752500780902018-02-03T11:53:00.001+00:002018-02-04T10:16:25.440+00:00STRANGLED (2017)
At one point during the final act of Árpád Sopsits’s extremely grim, murkily-lit, based-on-true-events thriller Strangled (A Martfüi Rém), soul-crushed lifer Réti Ákos (Gábor Jászberényi), who has been languishing in jail for the rape and murder of a former girlfriend after his death sentence got commuted to life imprisonment, is marched from his dank prison cell and deposited before Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-82727921922932493352018-01-10T20:21:00.000+00:002018-01-10T20:41:34.162+00:00Kills On Wheels (2016)
Kills on Wheels is a re-naming for English markets of a film, the second from Hungarian writer-director Attila Till, whose original Hungarian title, Tiszta Szívvel, translates as Pure Heart. A comedy action-drama that actually has heart, and is entirely character-based, is a rare thing in of itself, but, as is being foregrounded much more prominently by the English title than by the film’s Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-58602896683590306572017-12-09T15:45:00.000+00:002018-01-10T20:21:50.598+00:00Der Müde Tod (1921)
Der Müde Tod (The Weary Death), aka Destiny, considered Fritz Lang’s first great German masterpiece of the silent movie era by many, also marked the beginnings of a new chapter in the development of his cinematic career. In retrospect, it can be seen as the overture to a portentous phase in German film culture that looked, in the early-1920s -- at least as far as the rest of Europe was Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-46963669955801881762017-09-30T18:33:00.000+01:002017-10-01T10:56:36.809+01:00CAPTURE KILL RELEASE (2016)
In films such as Michael
Powell’s Peeping Tom and the Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel-directed Man
Bites Dog, filmmaking itself becomes implicated as a dangerous tool that
promotes and enables murder for voyeuristic psychopaths who use it to procure
their victims, while exposing the prurience of the gaze of not just the amoral
antagonists of these films, but of us -- the viewers at home -- who Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-18920659803775220232017-09-24T14:04:00.000+01:002017-10-01T10:51:57.002+01:00THE ORCHARD END MURDER (1981)
WARNING: This review contains spoilers throughout
Christian Marnham’s tawdry offbeat
thriller The Orchard End Murder furnishes audiences with a curious
viewing experience in 2017 for a number of reasons, not least of which being
the fact that – uniquely for a film of its kind -- it presents us with a very
particular (and rather twisted) outlook on a mid-1960s milieu filtered through
a lens Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-34144817736906638662017-07-23T11:13:00.001+01:002017-07-23T11:13:07.287+01:00DEATH IN THE GARDEN (1956)
Between 1946 and 1964, the
great iconoclastic Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900 – 1983) found
himself, like many of his contemporaries during the Spanish Civil War, living
and working in Mexico, where he was able to resume his directorial career and make
at least twenty films in a variety of genres while working to tight schedules and with extremely low
budgets for producer Black Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79282191321582636.post-76381966464331424592017-07-06T16:11:00.000+01:002017-07-22T14:28:06.843+01:00VARIETE (1925)
The silent German film classic
Varieté
is a torrid, melodramatic tale of family betrayal, infidelity, sexual
obsession and moral intrigue that was released to great acclaim and success in
1925. It takes place against a big city backdrop of ribald and often
Rabelaisian film sounds and sights encompassing the worlds of carnival, vaudeville, theatrical entertainment and stage performance - mostlyBlack Gloveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01771303462033735870noreply@blogger.com0