I think it’s safe to say that Olga Kurylenko is one of our reigning Queens of Action. She’s been in the trenches for many years, in many different sizes of roles and films (HITMAN, MAX PAYNE, QUANTUM OF SOLACE, SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS, OBLIVION, THE NOVEMBER MAN, SENTINELLE, THE PRINCESS, EXTRACTION II), and she only seems to get better and better, especially when she’s headlining.
Like some of her male counterparts she has unattainable looks but such a strong screen presence she can still read as tough and/or relatable. She’s often required to portray a wider range of emotions than the fellas usually are, while also looking good kicking and stabbing and scowling. And in the tradition of Scott Adkins and others, when they finally put her in one of the big super hero movies (BLACK WIDOW) they gave her kind of a ho-hum character unworthy of her abilities. So she’s definitely one of our people. (read the rest of this shit…)
As a movie viewer and person interested in the topic of Elvis Presley, I feel spoiled that within a year and a half we’ve gotten two really good Elvis movies from two very distinct directors. Sofia Coppola’s PRISCILLA doesn’t feel at all redundant coming after Baz Luhrmann’s 
BABY ASSASSINS is a 2021 Japanese film that I really enjoyed on Hi-Yah! a while ago and it has a sequel coming out soon (it already played at Fantastic Fest), so I figured I better get off my ass and finish writing the review. This is a movie that has some really well-executed fighting and bloody violence, but it’s really not focused on action. It’s mostly a very dry comedy about the lives of two freshly-graduated-from-high-school roommates, Mahiro (Saori Izawa, stunt double in the last two 
Okay, it’s weird to post a review of a Halloween movie the week after Halloween, but what am I gonna do? I watched it on Halloween. These things take time to write, but not a whole year. I’m posting it now for the record.
JUSTICE NINJA STYLE is a shot-on-video but very enthusiastic independent action picture made in 1986 in the town of De Soto, Missouri (population 6,449 as of 2020), that came out on an extras-packed blu-ray earlier this year courtesy of the Vinegar Syndrome partner label VHShitfest.
Every Halloween if I’m able to I like to write an essay on one of the great horror movies. This particular one is very important to me in part because it’s the specific movie that turned me into a horror fan. I’ve written about it before but here I try to get at both why I still love it and how it speaks to me about the world today. Hopefully I’ve done it justice. Happy Halloween, everyone.
I enjoy the work of director Jeremy Saulnier. He did the bleak, regular-dude-sloppily-getting-revenge movie 
Many years back I wrote about 
THE BIRDS. By Alfred Hitchcock. The one where the birds attack. Good movie. He was a total bastard to Tippi Hedren but she was good in it. Her first movie. Then she raised Melanie Griffith and a bunch of lions.
Every October for the last 14 years I’ve been doing what I call “Slasher Search,” where I try to scrounge up some obscure slasher movies you probly never heard of, preferably from the ‘80s, and usually still only available on VHS. Originally the hope was to discover some little-known gems from this particular subgenre and era I enjoy, or at least get to dissect some strange ones, and I achieved those things for a long time. But between the finite number of stomachable films of this type, my deep scraping of the barrel, and the fine work of Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and other blu-ray companies to shine their bigger spotlights on movies like this, I’m having a hard time finding fresh material these days. There will always be new horror out there to discover, but not ones that I considered eligible for the name Slasher Search.
I started to think I was reaching the end of the line last year, but some of you kindly encouraged me to keep going even if it meant adjusting the rules to a different type of movie. So I’m taking your advice. This year I’ll try exploring a different era of also-ran low budget exploitation by treating Tubi (and possibly other ad-supported streaming services) as my video store, searching for titles I’ve never heard of, to see if I can find some watchable ones. I went through a page of 1,000 horror titles and jotted down a long list of not-well-known vaguely slasher-ish ones, and I’ll pick some out to sample. We’ll see how it goes. No guarantees are being made. (Except that I started late due to all that 
