Simon Abrams

Demonic Doll Movie Annabelle Is Surprisingly Unnerving

Simon Abrams
Annabelle, an effective prequel to horror pastiche The Conjuring, surpasses its predecessor simply by virtue of occasionally being scary. Both films are over-reliant on deafening sound effects and side-eye glimpses of underwhelming ghosts. But Annabelle's scare scenes are better paced and more thoughtfully lensed. Its hokey, funhouse-worthy spooks -- a......
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Forgotten Flick Ravenous Is Best-Ever Manifest Destiny Cannibal Comedy

Simon Abrams
Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It's so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula's Gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti Western milieu of The Great Silence. It's a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set......

Meet Skinaflix, the Netflix for Aficionados of Old-School Porn

Simon Abrams
“Sex films sell, and other stuff doesn't ... or at least not nearly as well,” film preservationist Joe Rubin says. Rubin, 24, is one of the creators of Skinaflix, a VOD-style streaming video service he calls “the Netflix of porn.” At Vinegar Syndrome, a separate DVD/Blu-ray–centric home video company, Rubin......

Troma's Lloyd Kaufman: "I Hope the MPAA Burns in Hell"

Simon Abrams
Another project that never took off: What the hell were you guys thinking when you made Doggie Tales?

One of the people who worked for us, his significant other worked at this dog daycare center. He convinced Michael and me to make this. It didn't turn out to be very successful. But did you notice who did the voices? James Gunn....

The Wind Rises, Legendary Director Hayao Miyazaki's Final Film

Simon Abrams
The Wind Rises, Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's final directorial feature, is an emotionally generous and expansively detailed romantic fantasy. Based on Kaze Tachinu, Miyazaki's manga biography of WWII airplane engineer Jiro Horikoshi, The Wind Rises' apolitical, dreamlike drama valorizes Horikoshi as a dreamer who remains optimistic during wartime. As a......
On the set of Lords of Salem.

The Devil's Auteur: Rob Zombie Faces His Fans — and His Art

Simon Abrams
After working a packed auditorium into a frenzy at last September's premiere of Lords of Salem at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rob Zombie anxiously took his seat and watched his audience watch his film, his first independently financed feature. It's also the first film he's made following a messy......