So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious…(1975)

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Exploitation films seem so strange through a modern lens. By design, those films are filled with excessive violence, sex, and nudity, things that are often frowned upon today. I loved those films as a younger person, mostly because of those excesses. I love them as a much older person, but I’m much more understanding of the arguments against such things.  Still, there is something wonderfully entertaining about films that take things to the extreme.

The title and cover art of So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious…make it sound like nothing but dumb exploitation cinema. In truth, it mostly is exactly that. This is a film loaded with gratuitous nudity, and yet it is surprisingly tender and interesting. I’m not necessarily even against films that are just exploitative and offer nothing else, but I find it fascinating when they do attempt something more.

This is by no means a great film, but it is an interesting one.  You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Dust Bunny (2025)

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Mads Mikkelsen has become one of my favorite actors in recent years. I think I first saw him in the wonderful TV series Hannibal, portraying the deliciously deplorable Hannibal Lecter. But he’s been in tons of stuff, from Rogue One to Quantum of Solace and Doctor Strange. He’s one of those guys that just seems to show up in stuff, and every time he does, he makes the picture better. So I was excited to see him in this new film, Dust Bunny.

Bryan Fuller has made some great TV, including Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and the aforementioned Hannibal. I had no idea he directed Dust Bunny until I saw the credits roll, at which point I was like, “Oh, that makes sense.”  

Put Mads and Fuller together and you’ve got a recipe for a fun film.  And it is. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Die My Love (2025)

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Lynne Ramsay’s latest stars Jennifer Lawrence as a mother who is, well, let’s just say she’s having a hard time of it. Her husband is gone a lot. She lives out in the woods with few neighbors. Her baby cries all the time. The dog her husband brought home does nothing but bark. It drives her a little mad. It is a bravura performance from Lawrence and a very good (if difficult to watch at times) film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Five Cool Things and Idiots

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I seem to have forgotten to post my Five Cool Things from a few weeks ago, so here it is. This one features the HBO series DTF St. Louis, a Spider-Man comic I’ve been trying to find for decades, a Batman comic, Stephen King’s The Running Man, Buckaroo Banzai, and the trailer for a fun looking film.

Bend of the River (1952)

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Anthony Mann and James Stewart made a bunch of movies together. Many of them were westerns. Several are some of the best westerns made in the 1950s. Ben of the River is one of those. Stewart plays a man with a past who is trying to find redemption by leading a group of settlers to Oregon, where they will become farmers. He meets a lot of trouble on the way. Mann fills it with a lot of action and some beautiful scenery. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Rider on the Rain (1970)

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Charles Bronson had such an interesting career. For a while, he was a terrific little character actor in films like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, and then he became a star and for a time he continued making interesting (if not great) films, and then he got stuck making dumb action films that wasted his talents as an actor.

Rider on the Rain is a very interesting film. It starts out like a rape revenge film, then turns into a thriller, but it turns into something far more interesting. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Five Cool Things and Resident Evil

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Hello friends, I’m back with another Five Cool Things. This time I’m talking about the Gillian Welch and Wilco concerts I attended, plus Twins of Evil, Anaconda, and Mudtown (so mostly things I already talked about in these pages) plus the new trailer for the new Resident Evil movie. Click here to read all about it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Twins of Evil (1971)

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I suspect if you were to run some statistics on The Midnight Cafe, you’d find that I’ve reviewed more movies from Hammer Studios than any other one, and that Peter Cushing would be somewhere in the top in terms of actors I’ve written about. He is my seventh most watched actor, with some 37 of his films having been watched by me. I’ve written about eight of those films, most of which were Hammer Horror films. I’ve written about 24 different films from that studio.

That seems weird to me because Cushing isn’t one of my favorite actors. I mean, I do love him, but if I were to make a list of my favorites, he wouldn’t be on it. And I imagine if you took my ratings of all the Hammer films and averaged them out, the number you’d get wouldn’t be that high.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I keep watching these films. That’s not true. I do love me some Hammer Horror even while I can admit they aren’t always the greatest of films. It is interesting to me that I keep turning to them and that it’s only been the last decade that I’ve become a fan.

Anyway, Twins of Evil is pretty great.

Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a stern Puritan who leads a gang of dudes who love burning pretty young women at the stake. I mean, sure, they declare them witches first, and there does seem to be quite a few folks getting horribly murdered, lending credibility to some kind of ungodly horror going on, but really it’s just fun to burn girls out in the forest.

Up on the hill in his castle overlooking the village, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) dabbles in Satanism (and I absolutely love that all the summaries of the film use that language, “dabbles in Satanism.”) While doing a bit of pretty young woman sacrificing of his own, he accidentally awakens Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth) from her grave. She immediately turns him into a vampire.

Meanwhile, two twin sisters, Freida Gellhorn (Mary Collinson) and Maria (Mary Collinson), arrive in the village due to their parents dying. They take up residence with the good Gustav, their uncle. Now Maria is a good girl who wants to please her uncle, but Freida is a bad girl. She likes to sneak out at night and get into trouble. When she meets the Count, she’s all over that stuff.

Because this is a Hammer film and one made in 1971, both girls love to show off their cleavage and spend a great deal of the movie in their nightgowns with strategically placed camera angles.

The girls are a pain in their uncle’s neck. He believes them to be evil (one might even say Twins of Evil, actually Gustav says exactly that at one point.) Slowly everyone realizes the Count is a vampire, and Gustav will finally use God’s name in the service of fighting actual evil.

As per usual with Hammer, the production design is impeccable. The sets and costumes look great; the lighting is gorgeous. Cushing is wonderful. Unlike a lot of characters in films like this, he isn’t driven by an insane need for power, but rather he is a true believer. He truly thinks Satan is out there destroying the world. That warped faith drives him to do mad things. One could probably say something about how his Puritanical sense of sex drives him to burn beautiful young women at the stake, but I’ll leave that be. The Collinson sisters are a delight. Madeline especially has a lot of fun as the wild Freida.

Also, as per usual with Hammer films, the script isn’t great. It introduces the vampire aspect but doesn’t do a lot with it. The vamps do recoil from crosses, but don’t seem to mind daylight. But the look of the film and the performances make it well worth watching.