Shameless Self Expression

Baptist preacher Russell Crowe and wife Nicole Kidman wrestle with the knowledge that their son Lucas Hedges is gay. Crowe’s answer, in consultation with fellow religious figures, is to send the boy to a gay conversion therapy retreat headed by Joel Edgerton. Kidman starts to see that Edgerton’s methods are insidious, manipulative, destructive, and completely and utterly useless. Crowe sinks his head into his bible for answers, whilst poor Hedges is in utter torment, wanting to please his parents, whilst also knowing that he’s gay and that’s just how it is. Can mother and son get through to Crowe before Hedges’ is completely destroyed? Troye Sivan plays another gay kid, Cherry Jones is a doctor, and musician Flea plays a military-style associate of Edgerton’s who tries to teach the gays how to be ‘manly men’ like him, whilst Edgerton tries to tie things to learned patterns of unacceptable behaviour or some disingenuous bullshit.


Co-star/writer-director Joel Edgerton has a bit of a tou…

Laura Gemser comes to Hong Kong to do some sexy snake dancing at a nightclub, and gets involved with two very different brothers. There’s Judas (Jack Palance), who despite his name and being a reptile enthusiast is rather a milquetoast sort, who takes an immediate liking to our heroine. Younger brother Jules (Gabriele Tinti) is seen as the less responsible one. Judas was given all of the family inheritance until Jules proves himself worthy after a five year period. It’s Jules who introduces Gemser to a lady named Gerri (Michele Starck), whom she immediately falls for and gives the brothers someone in common to be jealous of.


Like a Jesus Franco film with almost all of the fun bits taken out, this 1976 exploitation piece from writer-director Joe D’Amato (“Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals”, the notorious “Antropophagus”) is kinky and weird but not in any especially interesting way. It’s weird to a point and there’s plenty of full-frontal nudity and the occasional Sapphic touch, but that…

Jim Brown plays the title police captain an ex-Green Beret whose parents (who had mob connections!) are killed in a car bomb explosion. Slaughter does everything he can to find out what happened and who is responsible. This has him getting in the way of an investigation by the Treasury Department, headed by a racist Cameron Mitchell. Mitchell isn’t happy for the intrusion, but nonetheless offers Slaughter a deal: Be charged with murder (Slaughter kills a mob guy), or co-operate with the Treasury Department. Slaughter, not being an idiot, takes the second option. Mitchell pairs Slaughter up with fellow agents Don Gordon and Marlene Clark to track down mobsters Hoffo (Rip Torn) and his grandfatherly employer Felice (Norman Alfe), believed to be behind the hit. Stella Stevens plays the surly Hoffo’s girlfriend, whom Felice arranges to seduce Slaughter. Robert Phillips plays the henchman you know is set to get punched all over the face.


Jim Brown’s career actually started before the Blaxp…

Set in a harsh, gone-to-seed post-apocalyptic Earth, Kate Bosworth and Tyler Hoechlin play a couple who aren’t quite on the same page anymore. However, they’ll need to work together in order to get themselves to safety at Bosworth’s parents place across country. Domestic disharmony will have to wait to be sorted out, whilst they have graver matters at hand. There are feral gangs and all kinds of creeps looking to nab them and do who knows what to them. Lance Riddick plays a family man who takes the couple in at one point, whilst David Dastmalchian plays a bleached psycho creep.


I like a good post-apocalyptic movie, but this 2018 film from writer-director Mike P. Nelson (based on his own short film) is more of a frustrating near-miss. Its borderline “The Divide”-esque bleak tone is a plus, but there’s just enough wrong here to keep this one from entirely satisfying. The performances for one thing, are crucially under par. Character actor Lance Riddick has a rare miss and is surprisingl…

Quite astonishing 2017 documentary from director Christopher S. Rech offers up a disgusting and shameful display of clearly very dodgy police procedure. It’s the story of ‘White Boy Rick’, AKA Richard Wershe, Jr., a teenage drug dealer who has over the years become infamous due to references in Kid Rock songs and the like. However, I only vaguely knew the name ‘White Boy Rick’, nothing about his story. What I found in this ‘stranger than fiction’ documentary horrified me. Detroit teen Wershe Jr. was clearly no angel, he was indeed quite a successful drug dealer at a young age, with his father also a criminal of some note. In the mid-to-late 80s, 17 year-old Wershe Jr. was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for a mere drug crime (carrying 8 kg of coke is nothing to sneeze at, however) due to a then mandatory life sentence law in Detroit that has since been dispensed with. Decades later, whilst every other of the offenders under this law had since been released,…

Set in the title town in New South Wales, buddies on a fishing trip (Irish-born mechanic Gabriel Byrne, Stelios Yuakmis, Simon Stone, and veteran character actor John Howard) discover a floating dead body, but after tying the murder victim to a tree, continue with their leisurely activity for the time being. We know creepy Chris Haywood is the killer from the get-go, and he’s further filmed in an over-the-top manner, and Haywood acts accordingly. When they get back to town (they report the body to police just before leaving), the media and many of the townsfolk condemn the men, sickened by their callous inaction. The situation worsens when it is revealed that the victim was an Aboriginal woman, and that one of the fishermen’s partner (Leah Purcell) is herself an Aboriginal. Laura Linney (in full-on histrionic, brittle mode) plays Byrne’s unstable American wife (it’s believed she may have suffered post-partum depression in the past), who hates his hardened mother, and after the fishing…