Reviews

This is probably my favorite Bunuel feature. It combines the surrealist potential of his more abstract works, such as Un chien Andalou, with a solid, if absurd, plot. In this case, a group of bourgeois party goers find themselves unable to leave a room. It gets pretty absurd as they have to bust a pipe in the wall for water and slaughter a lamb for food.

Meanwhile outside, no one is able to penetrate the building to save them. It's all pretty absurd and the results are hilarious. It's a premise that would make a great Monty Python skit and somehow makes for a great feature length film, too!

This is a great film for fans of the surrealist and dadaist movements and offers a lot of great moments by a wide range of talented artists, but it falls just short of the glory of what it could have been. The running time pushes the boundaries of what many of us, even fans of surrealism, can handle.

The film is a series of vignettes joined by a central story but on a whole it's not quite cohesive, and it's not even in-cohesive in an interesting way. All in all with the names involved, you just go in expecting more. It's a good little gem of experimental cinema but I was frankly wanting a little more...

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a great film with a wonderful agenda: it's a horror film that takes place in the realm of nightmares, which gives your imagination a lot to work with once you go to sleep after watching it.

Robert Englund is terrifying as the cruel sadist Freddy Krueger. His costume design and make-up is unmatched by any of the other slasher icons, and he is matched perhaps only by Nosferatu's Count Orlock in terms of character design.

This film really gets under your skin and gives you some serious nightmares. To this day, I have the occasional Freddy Krueger dream and they vary in levels of scariness. But this is a real testament to the film's ability to get under your skin and really bother you. I consider this a must for anyone looking for a good scare.

I really love the dreamy quality of silent films, particularly Nosferatu and The Laughing Man. This is a silent film made by surrealists and inspired by dreams, so of course I love it! This kind of cinema is not for everyone but if you're a fan of surrealist art or dreams in general, this one is for you! It's based more around unsettling imagery than story, which is generally true of dreams as well. There's a lot of disturbing imagery, including the well-known eyeball slicing that was referenced in a Pixies song and countless spoofs and the image holds up, kind of the way that Psycho's shower scene survives its notoriousness and still manages to scare new audiences today.

I have few complaints with this film and the primary one is that it's just too long for what it is. It should be about half as long, if not shorter. But overall, an important piece of film and even art history.

I like all of Man Ray's films, but this is the only one that I absolutely love. It was his first and is basically a series of experiments with light, shadows, and some innovative approaches to tampering with the actual film stock that precedes the films of Stan Brakhage. If you're a fan of his photography, this film is really little more than what you would expect - haunting black & white motion photography featuring nails, nude women and abstract objects.

I highly recommend watching this film to ambient music, especially some of the early Aphex Twin pieces. If you watch it in silence, you're going to deprive your senses and not really appreciate it as much. The film needs strange music to be enjoyed and as long as you're not expecting a story or characters, you should be pretty engaged. It's a great length, knowing to end before it gets too monotonous, unlike a lot of his later films.

I am in no way opposed to remakes. Not even horror remakes. Consider Carpenter's The Thing or Cronenberg's The Fly. They both improved on their source material.

I love Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street but it's not a perfect film. The teenager portion lacks the authenticity of Halloween, probably because those sections in that film were written by a woman who had experience as a babysitter. That said, Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street is at its core a superb horror film with a premise worthy of a 1920s silent film. The concept went downhill with the sequels, but Craven really exploited the possibilities of the idea of a cruel sadist with god-like powers in a surrealist playground environment.

When I heard this film was being remade, I was frankly delighted. It was time for a new version, and yes, even a new actor. Englund was great but I wanted to see someone else in the role. When I found out Michael Bay's production company was involved, my heart sank. Then I found out they cast Jackie Earle Haley, and my hopes rose. Then I saw the trailer and felt pretty good about it, aside from the character redesign which looks more like one of the creatures from Pan's Labyrinth.

Anyway, this film really failed for me. Freddy just didn't look right, and the teen portions this time are really annoying. The dream sequences just aren't the same. They rely more on CGI than practical effects. The Freddy-coming-out-of-the-wall image, for example, was unbelievable in the original, when it was simply done with latex and clever lighting. The remake relies on CGI which makes it look like a video game or a nightmare you'd have after watching a Dreamworks cartoon.

Most everyone knows by now to stay away from this film and I suggest you heed everyone's warnings. I can't say anything else about this film other than it's not very good and what you'd expect from an early 90s music video director.