Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
2LDK - Stop pushing boundaries!
Let’s look at modern films. With a few notable exceptions, cinema seems hellbent on the bizarre (and frankly WRONG) notion that more = better. From Lord of the Rings (MOAR FIGHTING PEOPLE!), to Avatar (MOAR DIMENSIONS!, MOAR MONEY), to Inception (MOAR LAYERS OF REALITY!) there is a definite trend towards the idea of giving you “more bang for your buck”. As cinema prices skyrocket, some bright spark seems to have formulated an idea:
Driller Killer (or "The Trouble With a Reputation")
Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer is a film far better known for its reputation than for its content. For those that don’t know, the film is a slasher flick from the US in 1979 and gained it’s level of notoriety in Britain in the early 1980s when it was included in the Director of Public Prosecutions list of films to be charged under obscenity laws. This list became known as the “video nasties” and would eventually prompt the creation of the UK’s Video Recording Act 1984, a piece of law that, for the first time, meant it was a legal requirement to have any video sold in the UK approved by the BBFC (the UK film regulatory office).
Stonehenge Apocalypse: What's the disaster genre about?
BOOM! BLAM! SMASH! KABOOM!
There’s something so captivating about the end of the world. Pretty much ever since someone thought “hey, who needs a plot when I have special effects?”, the apocalyptic disaster has been a mainstay of the cinema world. It’s pretty much the ultimate one-upmanship in cinematic disaster terms (speaking on a terrestrial level at least). Why blow up a car when you could blow up a house? Why blow up a house when you could blow up a whole street? Why blow up a whole street when you could… And so on and so forth until someone says: “Let’s destroy the whole damn WORLD!”. And everyone high-fives him/her for their brilliant idea and they all go down the pub to have a drink and to bask in how awesome they are.
Poster Hunt #11 - Nightfall (and New Blog! New Blog!)
First up, here’s a Poster Hunt for July.
Here are a couple of posters for Jaques Tourneur’s Nightfall (IMDb) from 1957, starring Aldo Ray, Brian Keith and Anne Bancroft. I don’t write much about the films for these Poster Hunt posts (as I select them for artwork rather than the film - most of them I haven’t seen), so if you do want to know more about the film I’ll direct you to this comprehensive blog post at Noir of the Week.
Sherlock Holmes or Have The Asylum Upped Their Game?
[Screenshots and pictures coming soon]
Nowadays, with golden age of the b-movie so far behind us, with double screenings a rarity and everyone so enthralled to the big-budget CGI of Hollywood, the b-movie has become a self-conscious postmodern creation. No longer does it just happen to be bad, trashy, sleazy or cheesy; the b-movie style is actively sought, a nostalgic re-creation of the kind of films that were once so important and are now generally obsolete.
Let Me In // Let The Right One In
This is just a short and grumpy post.
Let Me In. If you’ve been paying attention you’ll know that it’s the forthcoming remake of 2008’s (?) Let The Right One In, a Swedish film that is easily one of the best horror productions of recent years (maybe even the decade?) and an antidote to the sparkly fang-less prancing of the Twilight saga.
Matt Reeves, the director of the remake is reported in Empire as saying that he simply can’t understand the furore around the remake, claiming it should be normal as Hollywood has been churning out remakes for years. Quite apart from the fact that the “it’s happened lots of times before” argument is a completely pathetic method of avoiding the point entirely, he has also chosen to ignore that the remake culture he refers to is usually concerned with remaking films that are twenty or so years old. Not two.
Just like Dracula... it rises, it rises!
Sigh.
Once again I’ve ignored this blog for way too long (not one singe post in June! Eesh…) and it’s become dormant and sleepy.
Once again I have a handful of “real world” reasons that I can mumble in an ashamed manner until I feel I’ve justified myself.
But more importantly: once again it’s time to kick Chopping Mall’s battered corpse into life! There it was, thinking that it could finally slip happily into the afterlife of eternal peace, only to discover that one quick occult-magic session, half a pint of roosters blood and a little bit of typing were all that was needed to drag it kicking and screaming and frothing at the mouth back into some sort of life. Much like Christopher Lee’s Dracula, however many times it dies, we can always pull it back from the grave.
Son Of Hitler
Sometimes you just can’t understand how or why a film was forgotten about. Sometimes you really can. Let’s just start with the title: it doesn’t bode well (or perhaps it does, depending on your opinion!). Son Of Hitler. Ok. Right. It’s a film about the son of Adolf Hitler. Unless of course it’s another Hitler or some kind of clever metaphor for… no, no, no, it’s that Hitler. Yes.
Big Screen Big Tune #3 - Zombi 2
This month, after a short break, Big Screen Big Tune is the brooding, stormy masterpiece by Fabio Frizzi for Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. Enjoy.
Poster Hunt #10 - Suspiria & Giallo
Whilst most of the posters I’ve selected for Poster Hunt have been classic style, painted scenes, I thought that this time I’d go for a more modern, minimal look: clean lines and bold block colours.
So here we have two posters, the first for Dario Argento’s Suspiria (a truly fantastic film, I recommend it highly) and the second for his much more recent Giallo (which I haven’t seen and which received very mixed reviews)