Irena (Kseniya Rappoport) is a Ukrainian sex worker who is looking for a job in fancy Italian apartment building and starts by cleaning the stairs, even though she already has money. Her plan is to get closer to the Adacher family who lives there, starting by becoming friends with the nanny, Gina (Piera Degli Esposti). And then, when that au pair is crippled by a fall — that Irena may have caused — she’s hired for the same role and takes care of Thea (Clara Dossena).

There’s a reason behind her madness. She has given birth to nine children whose theft was the final dignity that she could not bear in her horrific life. Stabbing her pimp, she has come to Italy as she believes that Thea is her child. And if she has to stage a crash that kills the girl’s mother Valeria (Claudia Gerini), that’s just a means to the end. Bad luck follows Irena as the pimp remains alive and wants the money she took from him. Even though she takes care of him and it seems that she will move into the new motherless house with Thea and her father Donato (Pierfrancesco Favino), the police arrest her.

In jail, she refuses to eat. Thea visits her and feeds her, which gives her an urge to survive. Many years later, we see her finally leave prison behind and a fully grown woman is waiting for her. It is Thea.

The Unknown Woman, unlike many giallo, was a huge success. It won David di Donatello awards for Best Actress – Leading Role for Kseniya Rappoport, Best Cinematography for Fabio Zamarion), Best Director for Giuseppe Tornatore, Best Film and Best Music for Ennio Morricone.

Tornatore is best known for Cinema Paradiso and Massimo De Rita may have written an award-winning movie here, but under the name Max von Ryt he wrote Blastfighter and as Max De Rita he penned Blood Link. Actually, his career stretches back into the 1960s with his first credited script being War of the Zombies.

This was Italy’s official submission to the 80th Oscars Best Foreign Language Film category. It lost to The Counterfeiters.

Regardless of high class this is, it’s heart beats yellow blood.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Alex Infascelli has made some intriguing films. The first of his I saw was his documentary S Is for Stanley, which is about Stanley Kubrick and his personal chauffeur and assistant Emilio D’Alessandro. He also made a few other giallo movies, including Almost Blue and The Vanity Syrum.

Written by Infascelli with Vincent Villani, Olivia (Chiara Conti) and her friends Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), Nicole (Mandala Tayde), Christina (Olga Shuvalova) and Summer (Claire Falconer) have travelled to a farmhouse where they will undergo a purification ritual and only drink water. No phones, no food, just them and water. Of the friends, Olivia is the one who is most often made fun of, as she’s too sweet. But what a secret she has. Inside her body is her unborn twin Helena, who has left behind teeth in her shoulder. While in the middle of the madness that the water brings on, she tears out those vestigial teeth with her hands. And then it gets worse.

Featuring effects by Sergio Stivaletti (The Wax Mask), this feels like a new take on the f giallo, a movie where what should be a peaceful time of meditation is transformed into horror inside a glass-walled villa. I have no idea exactly how it got to where it got, as it could have been polluted water, the hidden twin, witchery or just plain mental illness. A lot of it feels like an art film with giallo leanings — hey, that sounds good — and some reviewers have outright hated the acting and the fact that nothing occurs for long stretches of time. But when it gets going, it really hit with me. Hopefully you will get the same thing out of it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I’m always kind of interested in when a cartoon revises its characters to become characters from A Christmas Carol. Daffy Duck, yes, I buy him as Scrooge, now running a big store called Lucky Duck and ruining the lives of the other Looney Tunes. Also, because there aren’t all that many Looney Tunes to go around, this has to go deep cut and include characters like Playboy Penguin, Priscilla Pig, Egghead Jr., Henery Hawk and Barnyard Dawg Jr. along with the characters that everyone knows.

Porky is Bob Cratchit, Sylvester the Cat is Jacob Marley, Granny and Tweety are the Ghost of Christmas Past, Yosemite Sam as the Present and Tasmanian Devil is the Future. As for other characters, most of them — Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Foghorn Leghorn, The Three Bears, Sam Sheepdog, Claude Cat, Charlie Dog, Miss Prissy, Gossamer, Barnyard Dawg, Mac, Tosh, Hippety Hopper, Beaky Buzzard, Pete Puma, Hubie and Bertie  — all work in the store.

Bugs Bunny just starts the whole thing off and keeps coming back to upset the duck. This doesn’t get into the sadness of the Charles Dickens story to the level that A Flintstones Christmas Carol gets into. I mean, that leans into death like no cartoon I’ve seen outside of Japanese ones.

But you know, if you want to put on a modern Looney Tunes and see how they’d treat a classic, here it is. I know that this is where as old man I need to mention that I grew up on the originals and how much better they would be than this, but man, all these battles against the fact that things are always worse and that this was made 17 years ago and there have been worse things since then has diminished my fighting edge.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Chiisaki Yūsha-tachi Gamera (Little Hero: Gamera) is the 12th Gamera movie and the second reboot. It’s also the first movie in the series made by Kadokawa Daiei Studio after the company purchased Daiei Film. There was no sequel and no more Gamera films until 2023’s Gamera Rebirth animated series.

In 1973, Kousuke (Kanji Tsuda) watched as the town of Shima, Mie was destroyed by several Gyaos until Gamera saved the day, helping everyone to escape before destroying himself to stop the threat.  Thirty three years later, he’s a widower with a son named Toru (Ryo Tomioka). Life is hard and his son worries constantly about losing everyone in his life after the death of his mother.

One day, he and his friends Katsuya and Ishimaru discover an egg near where Gamera was last seen. It soon grows into a small turtle that can spin and fly just like the larger kaiju. He’s just in time, as there’s another kaiju called Zedus who is eating people and destroying cities. He easily defeats Toto who is saved by the government and healed. However, the red stone that is needed to give him his full power has been given to Toru’s friend Mai (Kaho) for luck as she goes into surgery.

Directed by Ryuta Tasaki, who has directed several Kamen Rider movies, and written by Yukari Tatsui, this had some complain that it was too kid-friendly. Maybe they hadn’t watched any Gamera movies before, those that believed all the older movies were for grown-ups.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

SPOILER WARNING: You can probably consider this review a bit unobjective seeing as how I love this movie so much and contributed to the commentary and liner notes for the blu ray release.

You should totally buy it from MVD because it comes with a limited edition slipcase New Hampshire Forest Scent air freshener, commentary with director Rob Roy, another commentary with Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum and me, an interview with Rob Roy, the Rifftrax version of the movie, a music video, bloopers, a trailer, liner notes, a mini-poster, a sticker set and a reversible blu ray sleeve.

Director and writer Rob Roy has had a strong connection to wolves his entire life. It started after he first saw Balto, which inspired him to create his own wolf film. The film you’re about to reach about. The film during which he attempted to contact Balto star Kevin Bacon for a cameo before being somewhat ironically chased off the actor’s property by dogs.

He told the Nashua Telegraph, “Let me say first of all that I am an animal lover. No werewolves were hurt during the making of Lycan Colony. I’ve always loved werewolf movies, but I’m tired of seeing the same storyline over and over again. The werewolf is always a sick tormented beast. He’s always the bad guy. In Lycan Colony, we filled a whole town with them. Some are good, some are bad. None of them are these simple monsters that show up for five minutes at the end of the movie. They’re the life and blood of a modern town, and much closer to us than we’re used to seeing in these movies.”

Roy is self-taught and learned every aspect of filmmaking – from make-up effects to building his own camera dollies, animatronic heads and blood sprayers as well as building his own blue-screen shooting area in his garage – while making this movie. 

Dr. Daniel Solomon (Bill Sykes), a disgraced alcoholic surgeon, and his family move to a small town in the wake of one of his surgeries under the influence costing a patient their life. He has an AA sponsor so bad that he takes him to a bar afterward, a bar where he meets a brother and sister who are ex-military and looking for their adventurer father. Seconds after they explain the inscription on their father’s watch, the bartender ends up dropping it on their table, which is like Chekov’s gun going off before you even see it. This leads to a werewolf attack within the bar, the military brother getting killed and Daniel falling through what can only be a warp zone to escape.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s son Stewart (Ryan O Roy) has fallen for Sarah (Libby Collins), who comes ot his room late at night and brings him to a graveyard where she bites his chest and makes him one of the cursed under the full moon.

Who can save the day? Maybe it’s Athena, the witch played by Kristi Lynn, who loaned all of her exotic animals to this movie which still doesn’t explain why a spider monkey randomly shows up at the end. She licks everything with sight and then explains the history of werewolves in animation that I am not even remotely sure can be referred to as animation. Speaking of animation, the military guy has a neck tattoo that was added in post and it flickers. It’s the most disconcerting take-you-out-of-the-movie thing I’ve ever seen and yes, it is awesome.

Made in Hudson, Bedford, Goffstown, Merrimack and Manchester, New Hampshire — which is why this had the tagline “Welcome to New Hampshire…Live free or die!” — you’ll perhaps struggle with some of the accents. These towns are the homes of stars like Seth Meyers, Sarah Silverman, Jane Balder from V, Grace Metalious who wrote Peyton Place and Adam Sandler. Perhaps most relevant to this film are the facts that GG Allin was born there as well as The Howling star Christopher Stone.

Keeping it local, the movie premiere at Chunky’s Cinema Pub in Pelham on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005 with a concert/film screening/Halloween costume contest extravaganza. At Chunky’s you can order a Caesar Romero Salad, Wizard of Ozzarella Sticks, Reservoir Dogs (yes hot dogs), the Parmageddon Chicken Sandwich, a Kevin Bacon Burger, a Carrie Cosmo, the Catalina Wine Mixer Sangria, Jurassic Pork Tacos, Rum Forrest Rum or a Jabba the Hot Fudge Sundae.

If you ask Rob Roy, he says that this movie is about “The sensual underbelly of animalistic human beings and what happens when we surrender to that.” He’s expanded the universe of the film in Rage of the Theriomorphs, a book in which Dr. Dan, Dave, Russ, Stew, and Sarah are back and getting accustomed to their new lives and new rules. A new mysterious death has caused an uproar and a new threat to the entire town has arrived. This needs to be a movie, right?

Lycan Colony is the kind of movie that shuts off my brain and lets someone else drive. I never really recovered.

Michael Mann was an executive producer on the original Miami Vice, so it makes sense that he returned to direct, write and co=produce this reimagined movie.

Starring Colin Farrell as James “Sonny” Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs, this film was inspired by Foxx discussing the show with Mann at a party for the movie Ali. Mann would go a bit wild on this one, leading crew members to say that he made sudden script changes, filmed in unsafe weather conditions (the film was delayed by three hurricanes) and filming in places that “even the police avoid, drafting gang members to work as security.”

Since making the movie, Mann thinks of it as one of the ones that got away, because after guns were fired near the Paraguay location, Fox went home. The production than couldn’t afford to go back, so the compromised ending just doesn’t work for Mann. He said, “I don’t know how I feel about it. I know the ambition behind it, but it didn’t fulfill that ambition for me because we couldn’t shoot the real ending.”

It’s also a wild movie because where the series was fashion and pastel colors — and this still has fashion, of course — this film is just darkness. Drug informants’ wives get their heads blown off with C4 necklaces. Said informant walks in the way of a truck. And the movie moves past Florida to drug hot spots and involves Sonny in a doomed relationship with Isabella (Gong Li), the financial wizard and lover of Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar).

I’ve had this conversation before, but if this was called something other than Miami Vice, people would have loved every moment of it. When that name came out, people immediately thought of the theme song and the past versus allowing this digitally shot piece of style to succeed on its own.

That said, we now live in a reality where you can watch it again and again without ever needing to associate it with anything else.

The Mill Creek steelbox of Miami Vice is exclusively available from WalMart. Extras include behind the scenes features and commentary by Michael Mann.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on July 20, 2022.

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.