The Comic Critic Reviews "Woman in the Dunes"

Woman in the Dunes is filled with allegories. They are layered over each other. Some are obvious and others construct the full meaning of the film. There are so many interesting possibilities that cinemaphiles spend hours discussing them. Woman in the Dunes has always been an art house film. For its very skillful use of sound, cinematography, and story, it received a nomination for Best Foreign Film from the Motion Picture Academy. However, an average viewer might find the film dull in places. Dry sand flowing like water might have deep meaning to the narration, but its constant appearance might be boring to an audience more accustomed to explosions and jump scares. There are moments of high tension to be had. But they cycle back into an ever-growing feeling of frustration and exhaustion that is a good portion of the story. While you watch Woman in the Dunes, you should prepare yourself for a full meal of hidden and obvious meanings behind situations, objects, how the objects are shown, and the sound. The sound is one of the best things about Woman in the Dunes: it creates a narrative onto itself. Viewers might be tempted to re-watch it just to capture the narrative of the sound and how it changes, just like our hero does throughout the movie.

The Comic Critic Reviews Matango aka: The Attack of the Mushroom People

I can’t help but wonder if Matango inspired Gilligan’s Island. You have a small crew of people with different roles in society cruising the high sea for jollies when a storm comes up and shipwrecks them. In Matango, the island on which they are shipwrecked has barely anything edible on it. Most of the movie is spent revealing the various crew members’ truly cruel and selfish natures as they struggle to survive starvation. It’s a dark and uneasy story compared to the kindhearted Gilligan’s Island, where everybody cheerily works together on their island rich in its bounty: bananas and coconut radios. It’s Matango‘s dark, brooding atmosphere that makes it so creepy. And also creepy is that the mushrooms’ poisonous nature is known, but never truly accepted (except towards the end of the movie). The mushrooms are more than an obvious physical metaphor on human society. Or maybe it’s the evil of peer pressure. Or it might be a bit of both.

Tonight I will be participating in a Pumpkin Carving Contest hosted by the CLAW. I'll be sure to post photos of the various pumpkins later.

The Comic Critic Reviews "The Machine Girl"

Let’s not kid ourselves; The Machine Girl falls well into the category of Grindhouse, with big sloppy doses of gore. So, besides judging on the amount of gore, we are also judging on the amount of shameless violence (preferably involving plenty of gore) and the personal code of vigilante justice (most definitely needing plenty of gore). The fact that this little gem has the novelty of being relatively new and from Japan is just extra whipped cream and cherries on a blood-soaked dessert. This film may not be for the squeamish or those with a strict sense of anatomy, but it is gruesome fun for those of us who enjoy a splatterfest.