I Know Who Killed Lindsay: Stripping Back the Layers of a Neglected Trashterpiece

J uly 27th, 2007: twenty-five days after her milestone 21st birthday, Lindsay Lohan’s latest star vehicle—the intriguingly titled, mid-budget brainfuck I Know Who Killed Me—was laid bare upon 1,320 North American screens. In a statement issued to gutter rag TMZ almost a month to the day afterward, the erstwhile Disney princess candidly declared: “I am addicted…

Gimme Moore: The Making of a Pitiable Monstress in ‘Maps to the Stars’

V ery few performers nail neurosis like Julianne Moore. Between her stupefying embodiment of a housewife on the brink in Todd Haynes’ terrific Safe (1995), tightly-wound turns in a sprawling pair of PT Andersons (Boogie Nights, 1997; Magnolia, 1999), the contemptible social climber at the core of Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace (2007), a nuanced metamorphosis of…

The Sharp, Sour Taste of ‘Candy’

[Candy is currently available to stream on Hulu in the U.S. Other territories to be confirmed.] T he concept of a “perfect crime” may well be best suited to the lurid pages of hardboiled fiction, but if ever a bona fide baddie has gotten away with murder, it’s Candy Montgomery. Accused of thwacking to death—forty-one…

Shopping for Suspense in Brian De Palma’s ‘Body Double’

[The screenplay excerpts contained herein are my own creation; it was not my intent to imitate the work of Brian De Palma/Robert J. Avrech—I have not read their script for Body Double.] A great set piece is to the suspense film what fresh air is to oxygen: imperative. More so than story, dialogue, or performance,…

‘Don’t Look in the Basement!’ — You’ll Find Nothing but Misery Down There

T he relationship between psychiatry and the movies has long been fraught with failure. For every well-intentioned cinematic dive into the catacombs of mental illness, there are countless stories that have bypassed authenticity for the glamour of tone-deaf sensationalism. The setting of an asylum, particularly, has proved time and again to be a prosperous fount…

Life Out of a Suitcase: My Enduring Love Affair With VHS

“M u-uum! Pur-leaaase!” I remember it like it was yesterday: our local independent video shop, its sharp fluorescent ceiling lights flooding down over twelve-year-old me and mother dearest, whose stern visage told that she was decidedly unimpressed by the ‘15’ rated videotape I was waving about in front of her. This was far from the…

The Devil Is in the Detail: The Visual Kinship of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Perfume of the Lady in Black’

“I mitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, the brilliant Oscar Wilde once affirmed. An irrefutable game changer for big-screen scares, it’s no real surprise to spot the narrative crux and mesmeric visual witchery of 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby—Roman Polanski’s insidious reading of the satanic Ira Levin page-turner—looming palpably over The Perfume of the Lady in…