EATEN ALIVE (1976)

Located on the “Horror on the Bayou” bonus feature on Arrow’s impeccable 2015 Blu ray release of Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive, the director spends seventeen long minutes uncomfortably spinning a tale of the production of his third feature from 1976. His recollection is so hazy, halting, and half-recalled that, given the final product that played […]

HealtH (1980)

When you begin to consider the high-level talent that went into the formula that produced Robert Altman’s HealtH, it’s difficult to recall another movie in film history that was, and continues to be, treated as poorly. Coming directly after Altman’s twin failures of 1979, Quintet and A Perfect Couple, its production was relatively quick and on-the-fly; an […]

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON (1976)

At the conclusion of Nashville, the camera pans upward into the high heavens and the last image we see before staring off into the ether is the American flag. So it is appropriate that, at the beginning of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, the film that was released the following […]

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Into the impossibly soggy, Pacific Northwestern frontier “town” of Presbyterian Church rides John McCabe. Call him a “gambler” and he’ll gently correct you (“Businessman… businessman,” he’ll say in an attempt to convince himself more than you). Call him a gunfighter and he’ll avoid the subject altogether but only after you believe he very well could […]

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

If Eggshells was Tobe Hooper’s way of showing Texas as a hospitable place where the entrenched past and the progressive future could find an uneasy truce in the name of peace, love, and harmony, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, his sophomore effort from 1974, aims to tear all of it down with shocking abandon. […]

EGGSHELLS (1969)

Opening on a flock of birds gathered in a great tree against the orange Texas sky right before they launch themselves out and flutter away, Tobe Hooper’s Eggshells announces itself is a movie about transitions. From the leaving of the nest to the building of the nest and everything in between which even includes, according […]