Today I’m looking at a pair of crime movies adapted from books by two of my favorite authors. I almost said ârecent crime moviesâ because you know how time is, but it turns out one is more than five years old and the other is more than ten. It’s just that I put them off forever because I was afraid I was going to hate them. It turns out theyâre both pretty well made movies, but yeah, I donât think they have the spark Iâm looking for.
LIFE OF CRIME (2013) is the adaptation of Elmore Leonardâs The Switch, about the time Ordell Robbie (Yasiin Bey, 16 BLOCKS) and Louis Gara (John Hawkes, NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW) kidnapped a rich guyâs wife. These are of course the characters he later returned to in Rum Punch, which was turned into JACKIE BROWN, so this has the novelty/pressure of being a sort-of prequel to a crime movie classic from a modern master, which I think most of us agree is either the best or second best Leonard adaptation ever. Good luck, writer/director Daniel Schechter (SUPPORTING CHARACTERS) living up to that.
Obviously he didn’t knock it out of the park, or you would’ve heard about it. Though Iâd say itâs more on point tonally and â70s-period-wise than the movie of FREAKY DEAKY, itâs overall less fun. But I guess I just like this kinda stuff enough that I found it somewhat interesting. (read the rest of this shit…)
I donât say this lightly, but I think Guillermo del Toroâs FRANKENSTEIN might be up there pretty high among the top Frankensteins? Or at least it hits hard for me. Itâs one of the more faithful adaptations of Mary Shelleyâs 207-year-old novel Frankenstein: But If You Think About It Itâs Almost Like a Modern Prometheus, but itâs reinterpreted enough to feel like pure, personal del Toro.
At some point on this here internet I started seeing people refer to the alien species from the 
You know from the jump that BASKET CASE 2 (1990) is gonna have a little more money behind it than the first one, because it has both Troma and Shapiro Glickenhaus credits. That’s power right there. For those just joining it starts with footage from the end of part 1, with poor Duane and his murderous, surgically separated lump brother Belial hanging off a hotel sign, falling and splattering in front of screaming New Yorkers. We also get a news report from Times Square, describing Belial as âa small, grotesque monstrosityâ and a âsmall, twisted deformity whose most startling feature is an unnervingly human faceâ and a âstrange little beingâ that âmight actually be human.â
BASKET CASE (1982) is one of those cult movies everybody knew about in the â80s and â90s. It stayed alive by having a couple sequels and being in video stores or being mentioned often in Fangoria. Now itâs on 4K disc and on Shudder with credits saying it was restored by the Museum of Modern Art. But it was genuinely a creature of the grindhouses, a $35,000 exploitation movie conceived in Times Square by twentysomething New Yorker Frank Henenlotter, written on napkins at Nathanâs Famous, and shot in 16mm, partly in front of XXX theaters on 42nd Street. The producer was a hospital administrator whose only other films are Henenlotterâs and two yoga videos.
MATERIALISTS is a movie I missed in theaters, caught on blu-ray a while back, and this week it will start streaming on Home Box Office Maximum, if you want to catch it to. I really needed to see it because itâs the second movie from writer/director Celine Song. Her first was PAST LIVES (2023), which I didnât review, but I loved it. Itâs about an American woman (Greta Lee) reuniting with a guy (Teo Yoo) who she knew before her family left South Korea when she was little. Heâs handsome and in love with her and reminds her of her roots, but also she loves her life and her boyfriend and oh man. Itâs so good. Swooningly romantic, achingly beautiful, keenly observant, feels so true to people and to life, never like a formula. Why didnât I write about it? Maybe I was afraid I couldnât do it justice. I should watch it again.
The last time I saw Guillermo del Toroâs debut CRONOS (1992) mustâve been more than thirty years ago. I know I was aware of it before he came out with 
AMERICANA is an ensemble crime movie set in rural South Dakota and Wyoming, where regular, likable doofuses clash with dangerous, organized crime doofuses. It definitely falls into the category of contemporary westerns (complete with a siege), but it might also be fair to say itâs in somewhat of a â90s post-Tarantino indie crime movie vein. Only in a good way, Iâd say. Not a copycat. It’s a good variation on a clever but unpretentious story with some violence, some laughs, a good cast playing colorful characters, and even some interesting themes running through it. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
There was a time when I was 14 years old and Clive Barkerâs NIGHTBREED was my favorite movie. Maybe that was too soon to move on from 
