Before the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, the director most commonly associated with getting down was Adrian Lyne. His films — Foxes (1980), Flashdance (1983), 9 1/2 Weeks (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), Jacob’s Ladder (1990), Indecent Proposal (1993), Lolita (1997), and Unfaithful (2002) — have received their fair share of bad press, but underneath the sex […]

This article contains spoilers for Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Since it was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the term “final girl” has become ubiquitous. Many essays, retrospectives, and listicles have been written about the pantheon of Final Girls, with […]

“There is something about this middle-aged bald guy that is thrilling!” A Curb Your Enthusiasm joke that’s as much about middle-aged bald guy Larry David as the show resting on his slumped shoulders, it also calls into question the unlikely appeal of the action sub-genre represented almost exclusively by one man and one franchise — […]

The music video as it was known in its heyday is now all but dead, reborn as online videos that roam the halls of YouTube and Tidal Exclusives. At their peak, however, they were incredibly effective short films-cum-advertisements, selling records and concert tours. Eventually, Hollywood realized they could also be used to sell movie tickets, […]

From the moment the project was announced, the easy conclusion to jump to was that The Shape of Water was Guillermo del Toro’s sneaky way of making a spin-off about Abe Sapien, the amphibious man played by Doug Jones in both of del Toro’s Hellboy movies. That turned out not to be the case, but […]

With the premiere of the Paramount Network’s Waco miniseries alongside continued controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Manson-era film, there’s never been a better time to revisit the allure of the cult. But where real-life leaders like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and David Koresh saw themselves as Messiah-like figures, most cult leaders in movies defer to […]

Editor’s note: After we’d published two of these columns, we discovered that Noel Mellor already has a well-established podcast and book called “Adventures in VHS.” We chose the name at the last minute and neglected to check whether anyone was already using it — totally our mistake. We apologize to Noel and encourage you to […]