Omni vincit amor (allegedly)

So the first month of this new year draws to a close. Already, fractionally, the evenings are that little bit lighter. February takes her place in the calendar tomorrow. Shop windows are already bedecked with swathes of pink crepe, flowery designs and cuddly toys holding out ersatz roses. Spring is just round the corner and a young man’s thoughts turn to romance.Well, fuck that shit here on The Agitation of the Mind! Granted, I’m a happily married...

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GIALLO SUNDAY: The Killer Must Kill Again

Pop quiz. Question 1: you’re a businessman with a cashflow problem, a rich wife who’s pissed off at you because of your philanderings and a business deal that’s about to go south. Do you: (a) start seriously making it up to your wife in the hope that she’ll bail you out; (b) file for bankruptcy and get realistic about the fact that divorcing proceedings are on the horizon; (c) commit suicide and rid the world of your loathsome presence because you’re...

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SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Heather Graham

Happy 41st birthday to Heather Graham....

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Strait Jacket

Shinji Ushiro’s hectic anime ‘Strait Jacket’ takes a premise that requires a suspension of disbelief plus VAT, welds it to a hefty chunk of mythology and tries to make the whole thing fly with a script that’s this close to having its certificate of airworthiness rescinded. First things first: the set-up. In an alternative history, an experiment harnesses the power of “mythical magic” (as opposed to what other type?) and brings it into the real world....

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Bernd Eichinger

Writer, producer and director Bernd Eichinger passed away on Monday at the age of 61. According to reports, he died of a massive heart attack during a meal with family and friends. Hellish for them – and my heart goes out to them – but if there’s a preferable way to go, then surely it’s surrounded by those you love and care about.In a career that stretched back to the late ’60s, Eichinger was least prolific as a director – just six titles (and two...

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Nina's Heavenly Delights

After the angst-ridden lesbian coming of age drama ‘Lost and Delirious’, reviewed yesterday, here’s a lesbian drama that’s virtually angst free. In fact it’s closer in tone to a rom-com than a drama. And there are no coming of age heartaches either. There is, however, a cookery competition. Following her father’s death, Scottish-Asian Nina (Shelley Conn) returns to her native Glasgow after fleeing from an arranged marriage three years previously....

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Lost and Delirious

Posted to coincide with Mischa Barton’s 25th birthday.In an ideal world, ‘Lost and Delirious’ would have been made in the ’50s, shot in sumptuous and utterly artifical Technicolor and been directed by Douglas Sirk. It would have been implicit but bubbling with repression. It would have starred twenty-something actresses in pigtails passing themselves off as teenagers. There wouldn’t have been a softcore sex scene of the Zalman King school. It would...

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GIALLO SUNDAY: poster edition

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SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Diane Lane

Diane Lane was the star of the inaugural Something For The Weekend gallery. A return engagement at The Agitation of the Mind today in celebration of her birthday. Streets of Fire Lady Beware Priceless Beauty...

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Ginger Snaps Back

The ‘Ginger Snaps’ sequel and prequel were apparently filmed back to back, albeit from scripts by different writers and with different directors at the helm. I’m not sure at which point during pre-production someone said, “Hey, let’s make ‘Unleashed’ a gritty, institutional movie and ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ a costume drama,” but I wish I’d been a fly on the wall. I’d love to know how that idea got sold. ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ is a prequel in the way that...

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Ginger Snaps Unleashed

When I reviewed ‘Ginger Snaps’ as part of the “13 for Halloween” project back in October, my buddy Aaron – formerly of The Death Rattle, now happily raising hell again at The Bone Throne, and a contributor to Italian Film Review and The Gentleman’s Blog To Midnight Cinema – asked if I’d be reviewing the sequel and prequel. I said I probably would. I had the chance to watch them recently, pretty much back-to-back. I’ll be reviewing ‘Ginger Snaps Unleashed’...

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Saints and Soldiers

The ‘Saints and Soldiers’ DVD case trumpets its status as Best Picture winner at seven different film festivals. The font is small and the white typeface kind of blends in with the snowy cover image, but if you squint hard enough, you make it out: Marco Island Film Festival, Ojal Festival, Heartland Film Festival, Winslow Film Festival, San Diego Film Festival, Sacramento Festival of Cinema and Long Beach International Film Festival. Nah, I’ve never...

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Piranha or Piranha? You decide

My thanks to my good friend Paul Rowe for the following article. In all albeit belated adjunct to the recent(ish) exploitation cinema series found on these very ... pages (?), I recently watched the re-make of 'Piranha' and it made me think. (Is ‘pages’ the correct noun for an online blog? Am I alone in my obsessive and intransigent avoidance of Kindle? Will anyone else miss holding a real paper book in bed, literally unfolding the story page by...

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FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB: The Church

About 30 minutes into Michele Soavi’s ‘The Church’, theologian/librarian Evan (Thomas Arana) delivers a whole screed of expositional dialogue vis-à-vis a group of Knights-Templar-alikes who were assigned to safeguarding the passage of crusaders but became a little too hardcore in their affinity for witch-hunting, punishing the ungodly and putting peaceful villages to the torch. Now, whether the dubbing was particularly poor in the first place or...

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GIALLO SUNDAY: Blood and Black Lace

As a die-hard and unapologetic lover of gialli, I have as much reason to shout out a big “thank you” to Mario Bava as a Bond movie aficionado has to Guy Hamilton for ‘Goldfinger’. You see, ‘Blood and Black Lace’ is the ‘Goldfinger’ of gialli. Yes, it was the earlier ‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’ that pretty much kicked off the whole giallo movement (just as ‘Dr No’ lit the fuse on 007’s fifty-year blockbusting history) but it was ‘Blood and Black...

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