REVIEW: Army of Darkness [1993]

“Well hello, Mr. Fancy Pants” Only Sam Raimi knows how you travel from The Evil Dead‘s straight low-budget horror to the campy “ultimate experience of medieval horror” ten years later, but it’s obviously worked for him considering the series jump-started his promising career to the heights of Hollywood’s Spider-Man. Even so, that original trilogy is a curious case in cinematic history switching genres and mythology on the fly to get weirder and weirder and more loved as a result. Ask ten people and nine will probably say the cheese ball…

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REVIEW: A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness [2015]

“Because they had sworn on the Quran, I had no fear in my heart” When you read that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy‘s documentary short A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness concerns a Pakistani girl shot and left for dead who survived to become a beacon of strength and bravery, do not simply dismiss it as “just like Malala Yousafzai.” While similarities do exist, the two couldn’t be farther apart in their contextual meaning above serving as two examples that prove women are treated as worse than second-lass citizens around…

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REVIEW: Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah [2015]

“Claude used to be a friend of mine—he no longer is.” Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah is a document of a documentarian: a time capsule of the twelve-year gestation of what’s possibly the greatest non-fiction works in cinematic history. Shoah‘s a ten-hour look at the Holocaust’s devastation via survivors and perpetrators in varying modes of interview whether out in the open or through hidden cameras, so no one would believe its director if he told Adam Benzine stories about the wonderful experience had during its creation. His was a…

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REVIEW: Body Team 12 [2015]

“My life is a sacrifice for the country to succeed” For Americans the Ebola scare was a handful of cases and nurses who weren’t as careful as they should have been. To the world it was thousands upon thousands of dead bodies—loved ones that family members can’t normally mourn because every second the deceased’s blood lays in the streets is an extra second risking greater contamination. It’s easy to forget the scope of epidemics like this when ground zero isn’t in our own backyard. We blame countries for being inferior,…

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