Outside of its Academy Award-nominated theme song (beautifully sung by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross), I will never understand the enduring appeal of 1981’s Endless Love. It is an anemic adaptation of Scott Spencer’s novel, and in my opinion is arguably the worst motion picture the great Franco Zeffirelli ever directed.

I Trapped the Devil isn’t going to end up on my end-of-year list of 2019’s best horror movies, but that doesn’t make it any less memorable or worthwhile. Writer/director Josh Lobo manufactures a consistently unsettling sense of building menace and dread, while actress Susan Burke delivers an outstanding performance in the middle of all of this discombobulating psychological mayhem.

Vice Squad is a product of its time. It’s an ugly film, one that digs into the muck and mire of the world it presents with almost gleeful gusto. All of which makes it easy to understand how Gary Sherman’s dramatic thriller has somehow stood the test of time.

The Wind is outstanding. Emma Tammi’s film has a delicately austere power that is poetically horrifying in its overall windswept magnitude.

Beck and Woods have made a nice little genre gem with Haunt, and I look forward to picking this one up for my personal library so I can revel in all its nifty tricks and treats again relatively soon.

Ad Astra is a daring bit of storytelling subterfuge that will only grow in resonance as time goes by, the final pieces of its complicated puzzle an emotional moonshot of catharsis and fury unlike anything I could have imagined trying to fit together beforehand.

While Downton Abbey will undoubtedly please fans of the series more than it will newcomers to the material, this movie is nevertheless a great deal of breezy fun.

“I want to please people, sure, but I also what to say to them, wake up! Look under the surface. Look how aggressive and violent our society is. It’s just so anti-life, it lacks tenderness and nuance. We literally have to talk about things like this with monster stories because it’s too delicate a topic.”
– Larry Fessenden

Fessenden has composed a mesmerizing little riff on the Frankenstein myth, and over 200 years after its first publication Depraved makes it clear there’s still plenty of electrifying life in Shelley’s classic tale, life audiences will likely keep thrilling to for untold generations to come.