Author Archives: JD DeLuzio

October Countdown: Nope (2022)

The night is upon us! The finale of our haunted Halloween Countdown, 2022, features two very different productions. We start with summer’s super, sinister hit.

The 2022 hit film features a pair of animal-wrangling siblings, a goofy tech guy, an old-school cinematographer, and the troubled manager of a roadside attraction. This disparate adult Scooby gang becomes embroiled in an otherworldly mystery out in the California desert.

It’s a little reminiscent of Spielberg, except you don’t want to look up in awe at the sky.

Nope.

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October Countdown: The Velvet Vampire

We often include a Hammer Horror film or cult film in our October countdown: this one almost qualifies for the first category and definitely suits the second. The Corman factory decided to cash in on the success of Hammer’s contemporaneous vampire films with softcore erotic elements. Stephanie Rothman, the rare woman among the era’s exploitation filmmakers, co-wrote and directed this frequently interesting but tonally incoherent flick about a young couple invited to stay with a mysterious woman, Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall), who is…. gosh, see if you can guess:

(a) a vampire
(b) bisexual
(c) all of the above
(d) it’s (c), right? Is it (c)? I bet it’s (c)!

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Weekend Review: Undone, Season One

We haven’t been doing summer weekend reviews of older films and shows, so here’s a bingeworthy series from 2019 which received a surprise second season in 2022. We’ll get to that (and Sandman) later. Meanwhile, here are four fascinating, rotoscoped hours of psychological drama, comedy, dark secrets, and time-travel.

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