Wrote about one of my favorite movies today, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. A revisionist Western masterpiece that’s a tone poem amongst a crumbling old West. With the shaggiest bunch of character actors you've ever seen.
Wrote today about the unmade genre films -- aliens! dinosaurs! dino-human hybrids! -- John Sayles has scripted in his stellar career. Sayles made plenty of monster and alien flicks, from the beloved Alligator - Piranha - The Howling "trilogy," to his own aliens and monsters in The Brother from Another Planet and Lone Star. But he also gave Spielberg lots to work with in the unmade Night Skies and Jurassic Park IV. Link in bio!
I indulge my obsession with bug movies and talk about the great Saul Bass’s Phase IV today. Iconography, obelisks, circles within shapes, and hyper intelligent ants. Link in bio!
Lately I've found myself increasingly digging back into physical media -- perusing thrift stores for DVDs and BluRays and, god forbid, VHS tapes. Picking up vinyl reissues, like the David Forman record in the image, long unreleased, produced by Jack Nitzsche, with a stellar band including Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Jim Keltner. I wrote a mostly-positive, mildly tempered piece about the return of physical media in the age of AI slop on Substack. I'll put the link in the bio. It's called We're All Becoming Vinyl.
Dug deep into syndicated horror packages for television -- like the Shock! package in 1957 that started the wave of Universal, Hammer, RKO, and AIP and kaiju films on Saturday afternoons and evenings. And dug into the costumed hosts who introduced such things, as many of us found our first horror movie love via Count Dracula Presents or Shock Theater or Chilly Bill Cardille or Ghoulardi. All on my Substack (Ghosts in the Machine) at areyouexperienced.substack.com -- at some point I have to change that domain. UGH!
I'm a huge fan of the movies Dog Soldiers and The Descent. But director Neil Marshall's output has been wildly inconsistent since then. I dig into why in today's Ghosts in the Machine. Link in bio! #werewolves #spelunking #neilmarshall
I've been plotting for about 25 years to build the official guide to horror and science fiction movies. Today, I get to launch my version. It's a guide to streaming movies, with direct links to watch anything out of 13,000+ movies. Adding trailers, poster images, etc. Also creating lots of watchlists of my curated taste - the best folk horror, the best giant animal monster movies, the best British horror films. It's at ghostguide.co -- or you can read more about it in my Substack today. I am super freakin' excited.
I wrote about the Spanish genre filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia on Substack, how he’s vaunted as the great filmmaker who never made a decent film. Funny tagline, but untrue. Link in bio
Wrote about challenging films, and what they mean to us -- and if they're "required viewing" -- on the Substack today. Hint: They're not! Also, that's a clickbait headline if I've ever written one. Link in bio!
