On the latest making-of documentary for Arrow Video, legendary exploitation director Jack Hill explains that Roger Corman requested that he should make a stock car film, capitalizing on their success at the time. Hill only accepted if Corman allowed him to make an art movie, the result was Pit Stop. […]
Rob Simpson
Chief Editor
Host of the Uncut Network. With a love of movies kicked off by Hong Kong Action and Claymation Monsters, Rob has forever been cradled in the bosom of Cinema. Rob has his hands in many a pie, including no budget film making. Filthy
Hands Over The City (1963): Evergreen Politics with the Mightiest Axe to Grind (Review)
Politics will never fail to aggravate, just as episodes from the past will never fail to hold some relevance to the now. Take Masters of Cinema’s newest addition, Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City), as the perfect example. People reading this review in England will be well aware […]
White of the Eye (1987): Tragedy, Giallo and lots of Peyote (Review)
Back in the days of VHS, discovering a film was a common experience – countless people visited their local video store in the hope of finding a gem. Now, in the age of the internet, there are few out of the blue surprises left. Films locked on VHS? Sure, but […]
Blind Woman’s Curse (1970): Teruo Ishii’s Weird Jigsaw of Japanese Genre Cinema (Review)
Japanese cinema is known for its eccentrics, whether its Seijun Suzuki, Takashi Miike, Sion Sono, or the many people keeping the splatterpunk movement alive in the still-thriving V-Cinema scene that gave birth to Miike career some twenty-odd years ago. Sitting at the top of that tree, however, is Terou Ishii. […]
Bleak Night (2014)Simply put, Korean cinema at its very best (Review)
Korean cinema came out of nowhere in the early 2000′s, blowing up conceptions for what action thrillers can be. They were the perfect antidote to a Hollywood system that was (and still is) becoming increasingly one-dimensional. In turn, giving directors like Park Chan-Wook, Kim Jee-Woon & Bong Joon-Ho the chance […]
White Dog (1982): Samuel Fuller’s Timeless attack on institutional racism (Review)
Slavery has been a hot topic in cinema over the past 18 months, what with critical & commercial darlings in 12 years a slave and Django unchained bringing racial inequality into the public discourse. With this social sickness being given an unheralded amount of attention there could be no greater […]
Wake in Fright (1971) All the validation ‘Ozploitation’ ever needed (Review)
For a long time, Wake in Fright (aka Outbreak) was regarded as one of the ‘great lost Australian films’. Although critically celebrated across the board, its infamously unsympathetic presentation of Australia, unflinching hunting scenes and poor box office saw it lost to history. Back in 2009, Ted Kotcheff’s film was […]
For Those in Peril (2013): Difficult Scottish drama in a minefield of styles (Review)
Not to be confused with the Ealing film of the same name, Paul Wright’s 2013’s Feature debut For Those in Peril is more of an amalgamation of Baltasar Kormakur’s The Deep and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt than it is a call back to Ealing. George Mackay stars as Aaron, teenager […]
Fellini’s Roma (1972): a poetic, visual painting of Roman life (Review)
Masters of Cinema released one of their first Fellini discs with the underappreciated Il Bidone, now comes their second release in as many months – the director’s esoteric microcosm of Roma and one of his most acclaimed films of the 1970s. The film drafts historical moments from pre-and-post war Italy, […]
The Killers (1964): Remake of Classic Noir triumphs through its characters (Review)
The second adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway short, the Killers is the latest release from Arrow’s Academy label. The first adaptation was the feature acting début of Burt Lancaster and is regarded as a film noir classic; this 1964 adaptation directed Don Siegel is a much more traditional crime thriller, […]