Category: Videodrome

At times, Juleen Compton’s The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean feels like a French New Wave version of A Hard Day’s Night or the lesser-known Arch Hall Jr. vehicle, Wild Guitar, refracted through the lens of an episode of The Twilight Zone. The strange blend of Merseybeat pop music, Americana naturalism, and La Nouvelle Vague aesthetics gives the film a surreal undercurrent. Coupled with a storyline that dabbles in mysticism and folk prophecies, The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean is nothing if not an oddity of 1960s American independent films, made all the odder by the fact that Compton had full carte blanche to make the film however she wanted.

Out of the Blue (1980) marks Dennis Hopper’s return to the director’s chair after a decade of exile, transforming what was intended to be a light-hearted coming-of-age drama into a domestic tragedy about wayward youth during the apex of the punk scene.

For a special “Halloween edition” of the VIDEODROME column, we sat down with author and screenwriter Sara Gran to discuss The Legacy (1978). It’s a rollicking conversation about the film’s impact on Gran’s life and work, satanic cabals, psychoanalysis, and much more.

The Reflecting Skin looks at explosions of both the emotional and nuclear kind and the ghastly fallout they leave behind. As the film navigates the battlefield of youth and innocence—of false narratives confused for honest declarations, of skeleton-filled closets that no one wants to open—it poetically reminds audiences that the worst nightmares occur during waking hours, committed by flesh-and-blood beings in the glow of golden sunlight.

Obsession is Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader at their most deliriously Hitchcockian, their fandom for the revered British director bursting forth from every frame. Obsession functions as a tale of memory and fixations as much as it works as a fanatical, meta-textual analysis of its creators: two young filmmakers obsessed with Vertigo, attempting to recreate their memory of it in their own image.

Shot during the contested 1992 presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, The Last Party is both an American time capsule and a disheartening case of déjà vu.

Possibly in Michigan has been called a pioneering work of lo-fi aestheticism, an advertisement for Satanism, and a “cursed film.” But is it really a surreal revenge fantasy based on the director’s relationship with the infamous Unicorn Killer?

Husbands is the unvarnished truth of masculinity in crisis, as deeply flawed and unflattering as it may be. In the absence of judgment and editorialization of its character’s actions, Husbands becomes one of the most wounded and unflinchingly honest deconstructions of the American male in cinema.

Before Lynch and Villeneuve, Alejandro Jodorowsky spent the mid-1970s trying to bring Dune to the screen. Frank Pavich’s documentary examines Jodorowsky’s ill-fated adaptation — what many consider to be the greatest film never made.

Rollerball’s current reevaluation is mainly due to its prophetic look at the future — a future that doesn’t seem too far off from where we may be headed, sans roller-skates and leather pants.