Early in his directing career, Brian De Palma made this documentary with Ken Burrows. It concerns the discrimination faced by African Americans in the 1960s and the work that it took to establish legal and social precedents that bridged the gap between hard-earned legal victories and the implementation of laws to protect them.
This doesn’t have much of the style that De Palma would come to show in his career, but to be fair, it’s a documentary. This is more about the left wing roots of the director and how he wanted to help document a moment in our country’s history that for some reason, it feels like we’re never going to move past. The fact that people had to fight to be, well, people keeps going.
Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn) is part of a team of diamond thieves pull a con at the Cannes Film Festival. Yes, not just Jess Franco makes movies about diamonds and gorgeous women. A model named Veronica (Rie Rasmussen) is wearing the jewels as part of a snake dress; she’s attending on the arm of actual director Régis Wargnier to the premiere of his actual film East/West. While Laure corners her in the bathroom and begins seducing her, Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney) and Racine (Édouard Montoute), her team members, run interference.
Laure is conning everyone, as she steals the diamonds and somehow escapes being thrown off a balcony by being confused as a woman named Lily who has just lost her child. Lily’s parents take her in and one evening, when they go out, the real Lily comes home and kills herself, allowing Laure to become her.
Seven years later: Laure/Lily is now the wife of Ambassador Bruce Hewitt Watts (Peter Coyote) and has her picture taken when she arrives in France by Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas). That photo is found by Black Tie, who has been in jail for the last seven years. What follows is deception, sexual mind games and a mid-movie reverse where time goes backward, an audacious move in a film built around water, throwing women off bridges and people being plowed down by motor vehicles. It also returns director and writer Brian De Palma to his theme of twins and dual nature.
It’s also totally worked up, having Laure/Lily get every man in a bar hard before forcing Bardo to fight one of them and instead of the fight, De Palma zooms in on her face as she loves every second. Sure, this movie is filled with male gaze — to be fair, Romijn needs an adjective better than any I can find to describe her beauty — and yet subverted every step of the way by a main character so in front of everyone else in the film that when she gets caught, she can literally rewind time or rewrite reality.
And man, that scene through the bathroom glass with the snake costume and cuts back and forth during the diamond theft? That’s why we watch De Palma.
While this was directed and written by Brian De Palma, this is an English-language remake of Alain Corneau’s 2010 thriller film Love Crime with a different ending. It’s an erotic thriller but you know, it’s also very much a thriller. Or a giallo. Or what De Palma does best, you know?
Christine Stanford (Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls) is an American advertising exec in Germany, working on a smartphone campaign with her Isabelle (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisabeth Sanders in the original Dragon Tattoo movies). Christine ends up taking the credit for their idea, which is well-received, but she never apologizes. Instead, she confides how her twin sister — oh man, De Palma hitting all his notes — died. But that’s when Isabelle’s assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth) convinces her to upload her own version of the ad which soon goes viral.
Christine drops a bomb on her former protege by leaking a sex tape of Isabelle having an affair with her husband Dirk (Paul Anderson), which causes her to have a nervous breakdown, crash her car, go into a depression and start abusing drugs. She doesn’t stop, as she tries to get both Dani and Isabelle fired using blackmail from a threatening letter written on Isabelle’s computer.
So when Christine dies, is it any surprise that the police jail Isabelle? She confessed while high, plus there’s that revenge letter and evidence of a scarf’s fibers on the dead body. But how could that happen when Isabelle was at the ballet? Maybe it was really Dirk, who has the actual bloody scarf in his car.
The end of this movie is like having an entire chum bucket of red herrings and twist endings all dumped on you at the same time and I love every minute of it. It’s ridiculous but also you can nearly hear De Palma laughing as he puts up on the screen.
Rapace and Adams arrived in Berlin a week before shooting started to rehearse the screenplay and had a lot of suggestions for the relationship of the characters, including making the lesbian subtext actual text. De Palma was a bit overwhelmed with changing the screenplay and also prepping the shooting, so Natalie Carter, who co-wrote Love Crime, came in to work with the actresses to add their new scenes.
Brian De Palma does not shy away from showing the dark side of war. In the same way that he looked at Vietnam with Casualties of War, Redacted is about the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings in Iraq where U.S. Army soldiers raped an Iraqi girl and murdered her along with her family.
PFC Angel “Sally” Salazar (Izzy Diaz) is an aspiring filmmaker who has joined the Army to save money for film school. He uses his camera to shoot the real moments that he sees as a soldier in the hopes of using his film, Tell Me No Lies, for his application. Two of his fellow platoon members, PFC Reno Flake (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and SPC B.B. Rush (Patrick Carroll), lose all control after the death of MSG James Sweet (Ty Jones), a military officer who has kept them in check on this tour.
While Salazr is filming, a French documentary crew is also embedded with the soldiers and making a movie called Barrage. During a traditional sweep, Flake misinterprets a man driving his pregnant sister to the hospital as an attack and strafes their car, killing her. He tells Salazar’s camera that it felt the same as gutting a fish.
After Sweey’s death, Flake and Rush decide that they want revenge. Specialist Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) follows them in the hopes of stopping them while Salazar films everything. They find an Iraqi girl named Farrah (Zahra Zubaidi) who they rape and murder, then kill her family before setting his body on fire. McCoy, forced out under threat of death, decides to report the incident with the Criminal Investigation Division (CID). At the same time, Salazar starts to lose his mind. He’s so distracted one day and kidnapped by insurgents who videotape his death by beheading in revenge for Farrah’s rape and murder.
After returning home, McCoy is at a bar with his wife when he is asked to tell them a war story. This movie is what he tells them.
This movie was as controversial as you’d imagine, with critics like Michael Medved saying, “It could be the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” It also may have led to Arid Uka killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt Airport after watching a clip of this movie and thinking it was true.
Man, more people need to discuss just how much of an influence David Koepp has on pop culture. He wrote I Come In Peace, sure, but he’s also had a string of blockbusters to his credit. Death Becomes Her, the Jurassic Parkseries, Carlito’s Way, Mission Impossible, Stir of Echoes, Panic Room, Spider-Man, Angels and Demons, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, War of the Worlds and more — that’s a pretty great line-up of work to have on your IMDB.
Atlantic City police detective Rick Santoro (Nicholas Cage) is watching boxing champion Lincoln Tyler (Stan Shaw) fight Jose Pacifico Ruiz (Adam Flores) with his best friend for life, U.S. Navy Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), who is also escorting Defense Secretary Charles Kirkland (Joe Fabiani) and arena director Gilbert Powell (John Heard).
At the start of the first round, Kevin is distracted by two women: Serena (Jayne Heitmeyer), a redhead with a ruby ring, and Julia (Carla Gugino), who has a platinum blonde wig on and a white satin suit. As Ruiz scores an upset knockdown, a gunshot is heard. Kirkland falls and Julia is grazed. Kevin kills the sniper and locks down the arena while Julia runs into the casino.
Here’s where the twists begin. The punch was a worked one and the champ took a dive, paid off by the redhead and there was a Palestinian terrorist named Tarik Ben Rabat waiting to kill Kirkland over the U.S. government sending missile systems to Israel. As Julia runs, Rick wants answers and, well, Kevin may want her for other reasons. De Palma gives away the twist early, but to him, this movie was more about the relationship between two friends and how they deal with an event that threatens their friendship.
After a life of doing whatever he wanted, Santoro finally does the right thing and it costs him everything. His family, his career, his friend and even his freedom. But he’s finally free, I guess. It’s a really intriguing hero’s journey.
What I love about Snake Eyes is that it has an uncontrollable narrative set inside controlled studio sets and the Montreal Forum. We don’t get outside until the very end of the movie. As for the closing, it was originally going to end with a tidal wave, but there wasn’t enough money. That said, that unmade ending is referred to throughout this movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on .
Based on The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, which is in turn based on the unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short — one in which her black hair had been bleached and then dyed red before she was surgically sliced in half with a technique called a hemicorporectomy, her skin washed and her body was posed with her hands above her head, elbows bent at right angles and legs spread apart — this 2006 Brian DePalma movie was in development hell until L.A. Confidential was a success and Ellroy’s books got hot.
The director’s cut of the film ran over three hours but was cut down to a little over two hours for the producers. Ellroy was highly critical of the released film and claims that the original cut is a superior version of the film and more faithful to his book.
After a boxing match between them, LAPD detectives Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) become partners and friends, bonding as a trio with Lee’s girlfriend Katherine “Kay” Lake (Scarlett Johansson). Beyond her trying to sleep with Dwight outside of her relationship, she’s also branded with the initials of the mobster whose arrest made Dwight’s career.
On January 15, 1947, their lives change when the Black Dahlia’s body is found.
Dwight soon learns from Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank) that Elizabeth was a lesbian and appeared in smoker films, a fact she doesn’t want to be connected with, so she sleeps with him in exchange for his silence and then introduces him to her rich parents. Meanwhile, the man whose initials are on Kay, Bobby DeWitt (Richard Brake) is out of jail, so Lee attempts to kill him and dies in the process. That grief causes Dwight and Kay to finally make love, but when she follows him later, she sees him with Madeleine, the woman who looks like the Black Dahlia who so obsessed her now dead husband.
The end of this goes beyond noir and pulp to madness, as incestual pornographic films, ruined rich families and femme fatales nearly wipe out most of the main players, which also includes Fiona Shaw as Madeleine’s mother, John Kavanagh as her father and Mia Kirschner as the ghostly Dahlia, seen only in flashbacks and death. Kirschner was originally on set simply to feed lines to other actors in their screen tests. potential actors in screen tests. De Palma and writer Josh Friedman cast her and expanded her role from the novel. As Kirschner resembled the real Dahlia, she knew a good deal about the case and had always been told if there was a movie about the murder, she should be in it.
Plus, the cast also has Rose McGowan, Rachel Miner, Angus MacInnes (Rosey from Strange Brew), Mike Starr (the hired killer from Dumb and Dumber) and DePalma regular — and Phantom of the Paradise— William Finley in his final film.
DePalma kept up his string of being seen as a woman hater by winning the Alliance of Women Film Journalists Hall of Shame for this. Other films inducted in 2006 were A Good Year, Basic Instinct 2, Beerfest, Little Man, My Super-Ex Girlfriend and You, Me and Dupree as well as Mel Gibson inducted for his languge about women when he was arrested for drunk driving.
David Fincher had originally planned to direct this movie as a multi-hour mini-series in black and white. He left the project when he saw that he wouldn’t be able to make it to his standards. While I like this movie, I would absolutely go wild seeing what Fincher would have done.
Brian De Palma joined this movie after Gore Verbinski. walked away due to c the lack of additional money for the budget. De Palma got that money, which went right into the CGI, but was already written and the film cast. At least Ennio Morricone wrote the music.
American critics hated it — at least Roger Ebert understood the issues, saying “It misses too many of its marks. But it has extraordinary things in it. It’s as if the director, the gifted Brian De Palma, rises to the occasions but the screenplay gives him nothing much to do in between them.” — but they loved it in Europe with Cahiers du cinéma picking it as the fourth-best movie of 2000.
But man, seeing Brian De Palma direct a movie based on a Disney ride is, well, sad. But you know, people need to get paid.
Graham Yost created Justified and wrote Speed, while Jim and John Thomas wrote Predator. I guess that just may absolve them all for this script, which is so talky and full of jargon that I almost didn’t make it through some scenes. I was kept awake by De Palma’s skill as a director.
Set twenty years in the future — which is now three years ago — the Mars I mission, commanded by Luke Graham (Don Cheadle), touches down and immediately runs into a bright white formation in the Cydonia region which ends up killing everyone but the commander. That structure? Oh, you know, the face on Mars.
Mars II becomes Mars Rescue and is made up of Commander Woody Blake (Tim Robbins), his wife Terri Fisher (Connie Neisen), Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) and Phil Ohlmyer (Jerry O’Connell). Their ship is damaged before it even gets near Mars and Woody sacrifices himself to save his crew. They solve a missing DNA helix and soon are admitted inside the face, where they discover that humanoid Martian lifeforms left the planet centuries ago but seeded our planet with their DNA, creating life that could one day make it to Mars.
As the astronauts all escape, the aliens invite them to follow them. Only Jim goes, which makes sense as he’s a widower with nothing left on Earth. Also: Gary Sinise’s eye makeup suggests that he either loves glam or is already part alien.
I loved that the astronauts are blasting “Dance the Night Away” by Van Halen at one point but the whole thing feels at once too long and too short. De Palma did what he could, I think.
The set was 2 million square feet and took 14,000 cans of paint to create. Today, you can see the turning wheel set and the model of the ship while you wait to ride Mission Space at Epcot in Walt Disney World in Orlando.
Also, you have to love this in the credits: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s cooperation and assistance does not reflect an endorsement of the contents of the film or the treatment of the characters depicted therein.
June 24: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
A cut and paste — I mean, Godfrey Ho’s name is all over his — of new footage with the movie Don’t Love Any Stranger, this starts with a couple making love before she slices his throat with a razor. Then, two women are sight-seeing before a gang attacks them.
There are two gangs in Hong Kong, the Serpents and the Scorpions. Interpol is on the case, sending an agent who targets a boss and pitting gang against gang.
We then go to a karaoke bar where Allison sings “Mickey.” The Mickey you’re so fine song, copyright be damned, this is, again, Godfrey Ho. She’s really there to find out who killed her friend Rosie, which means working in a hostess club owned by Scorpions leader Phoenix. A fight breaks out and the once cheerful singer shreds a man’s face before bonding with Phoenix, who decides to tell her how she got to her position, which mostly involved killing every man that wronged her. Now, she’s at war with the Serpents and their boss Hercules.
There’s also The White Tycoon, who has hired three secret agents — including the aforementioned blonde woman, who is the best part of this, killing numerous marks every time she appears on screen — to sow dissension between the gangs. He also likes to sacrifice chickens to increase his power before he fights the secret agent, who finds him by torturing the blonde woman by placing her face first in an oil drum, adding a rat and then throwing in a cat. And he’s the good guy, but as I’ve learned from Godfrey Ho movies, the good guys are allowed to torture people.
You know, these movies are all flowing together in my brain and now I have so many Thunderbolt-named movies: Majestic Thunderbolt, Scorpion Thunderbolt, Ninja Thunderbolt, Ninja Operation 4:Thunderbolt Angels, Inferno Thunderbolt and Mission Thunderbolt. I plan on watching them all, but there are times that between the fact that they are two movies at the same time and that they all flow together, they put me into a near-murderdrone drug state.
Which is why I am watching them.
I honestly have no idea what is happening in this movie for a lot of the time, but of all the Godfrey Ho movies that I have seen, this one looks the best quality wise.
At the height of sheer Q-Anon craziness — I think probably when a shaman in red, white and blue facepaint led an army of people into government buildings, and people defecated on the walls, maybe — people were grasping for straws and pearls and wondering, “How could this happen?”
I’m here to tell you that this has always been here.
In the 1980s, high school me was the same as old me. I was always in black, with long hair, and I only cared about music, movies and studying weird things. As such, I was brought into the Core Group, a team of teachers led by an occult expert cop who studied which students could be worshipping Satan. This group was led by my godmother.
The Satanic Panic wasn’t started by Michelle Remembers, but it felt like it was. The union of Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient (and eventual wife, but we’ll get to that) Michelle Smith. In the mid-70s, while treating Michelle for depression due to a miscarriage, she confessed to him that she knew that something horrible had happened to her and could not recall what it was. Using hypnosis, Michelle was soon screaming for 25 minutes non-stop and speaking in the voice she had as a child. 14 months and 600 hours later, a conspiracy was found: Michelle’s mother and other citizens in Victoria were members of a worldwide Church of Satan.
At one point, Michelle was part of a ritual that lasted 81 days that Satan himself showed up for, and during that time, she was tortured, raped, witnessed others get killed and was covered with the blood of murdered babies until St. Michael the Archangel, Mary and Jesus appeared, healing all of her scars and blocking all of her memories of the years of Satanic desecration of her body and soul.
None of these stories were challenged, even a decade after, when Michelle and Laurel Rose Willson, who wrote Satan’s Underground about being a breeder for Satanists and having two of her children killed in snuff films, were on Oprah Winfrey and at no moment did Oprah challenge either of them, in 1989. The year, I was repeatedly questioned and challenged and told that I was giving my soul to Satan.
I was a white kid from a small town, and in no way have I ever dealt with racism, sexism, transism or any isms in any other way again. This experience, however, showed me a small, tiny glimpse into what it’s like to know you’re right and everyone is sure you’re wrong based on no facts at all.
By the 80s, Pazder was an occult expert, consulting in the McMartin preschool trial and appearing on a 20/20 segment called “The Devil Worshippers” that stoked the flames of the Satanic Panic. That report claimed that movies like The Godsend, The Incubus, Amityville II: The Possession, Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Exorcist, The Omen and Omen 2 allowed people to visualize and be inspired by the devil. This aired in prime time on ABC, a major cable network. They also refer to The Satanic Witch as a book filled with evil rites. And then, of course, heavy metal. As Anton LaVey was in his era of not speaking to the media, this also has footage taken from Satanis.
As part of the Cult Crime Impact Network, Pazder got into business working with police groups and consulting on Satanic ritual abuse, while lawyers used his book while doing cases, and social workers used Michelle Remembers as their training manual.
According to NPR host Ari Shapiro, “One reason these fictions were so appealing was that they gave people a sense of purpose. They had a mission – to defend the innocent.”
This is what’s happening today. It’s why trans people are grooming children, why Democrats are eating babies, andwhy elections are being seen as conspiracies. Because the truth — the idea that things happen randomly for no reason — is less frightening than Satanism or Q-Anon.
Man, did I digress?
In Satan Wants You, filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams explore the history of Michelle Remembers and what most people don’t know, such as how Pazder and Smith left their families to be together and how the book was debunked. It would be one thing if their sessions led to a book and some press, but it would be another if they kicked off an entire movement.
The directors have stated: ““This is the first time that Michelle’s sister, Larry’s ex-wife, and Larry’s daughter have gone on the record to tell their side of this story. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to combine all these stories together to reveal the true origins of the Satanic Panic and show how they connect to the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies of today.”
This movie must be seen, even if we’ve entered a time when feelings matter more than facts. But did facts ever matter?
This film also found an anonymous source sending Michelle’s actual tapes, which have never been heard until now.
I don’t discount that she went through some trauma. Yet, how many lives were destroyed along the way?
The sad fact is that no one has learned anything. That same refrain of “protecting the children” exists today. And yes, that’s a noble endeavor. But as someone who grew up in a town of 7,500 people that had more than one Catholic priest abusing children in the last fifteen years of my life, Often, the abuser is someone the abuser has known and trusts.
Just like a worldwide Satanic network — paging Maury Terry and The Family, a book that lost a court case to the Process Church over false claims — and a public ritual lasting 81 days seems complicated to swallow, so do all the claims of the far right today.
Back when I was a kid getting grilled over my slasher movie magazines and love of Danzig, I figured, “Well, someday soon, all of these close-minded people will die off, and we can get past racism, and we can learn how to be more open-minded together.” But now, everyone is close-minded. No one seemingly wants to learn. And this movie is a great teaching tool — it’s a must-see, an intense documentary worthy of rewatching — because it happened before, and yes, it’s going on all over again. The message may have shifted, but it’s still the message.
And it’s still wrong.
The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook,Twitterand Instagram.
You may have seen Andrew Bowser play Onyx before in viral videos. As Onyx the Fortuitous, he’s also been listed as “Weird Satanic Guy” and his distinct speech pattern will definitely stick with you.
Now, Onyx is part of his own film, Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, directed, written and edited by Bowser. Yet Onyx does not live the dream life. He makes burgers for a living at Marty’s Meat Hut and gets abused at every turn. He’s barely tolerated by his parents (Barbara Crampton is his mom!). Yet he has one thing that he loves. Or a person, really. Bartok the Great (Jeffrey Combs) is an occultist who has created several learn-at-home programs — Letting a Little Devil In — that Onyx has studied in his pursuit of Satanism and now, he has a chance to be the magician’s assistant as he raises a demon from Hell. He’s one of the many followers lured into this ritual by Bartok’s assistant Farrah (Olivia Taylor Dudley, Paranormal Acivity: The Ghost Dimension), along with Bartok’s wife in a past life Jesminder (Melanie Chandra), magical scholar Mr. Duke (TC Carson, the voice of Mace Windu and Kratos in God of War), the tough, understanding and non-binary Mack (Rivkah Reyes, who was once Katie in School of Rock) and the prim and proper former church lady Marsha (Donna Pieroni).
However, Bartok has no interest in teaching any of these would-be dark lords. Instead, he is stealing their souls and transforming them into zombies, all to increase his power. However, the Fortuitous One is among them and it just might be Onyx.
Your enjoyment will be determined by how much you like the strange-voiced, virginal cartoon-loving loser at the heart of it. I thought Onyx was relatively funny and I didn’t have any issues, but some reviewers seem to in no way be able to get past him. But when a movie has gigantic puppet demons and an entire sequence that’s taken from the Meat Loaf video for “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That),” I think that feels like people who have no idea how to have fun.
I mean, more movies should have demon puppets in them. That’s a sword that I will definitely fall on.
The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook,Twitterand Instagram.
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