Ravenous

Ricardo from U.N.L.O.A.D.E.D gives us five overlooked and underrated vampire films.
1. Nadja
Pixelated imagery (shot with a toy pixel vision camera of all things) along with slick B&W cinematography pulled me right in.  This David Lynch produced flick mixes art film with horror and a nice dash of humor to boot.  Nadja (Elina Lowensohn) and her man slave arrive in New York City to claim the remains of their father, Dracula, who was taken out by Dr. Van Helsing played perfectly by Peter Fonda.  A young couple, Lucy (Galaxy Craze) and Jim (Martin Donovan) are pulled into Nadja's web of seduction which complicates matters as Jim is the Nephew of Van Helsing.  Enter Nadja's brother Edgar, who has no love for Nadja and things get even more dicey.  The film is an allegory about family dysfunction and while disjointed in parts,
Ricardo

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Why is it that so many horror movies look exactly the same as every other horror movie? It doesn't have to be so -- this week's new DVD releases include a straight-to-video gem called The Burrowers about a post-Civil War rescue party, looking for a kidnapped family in the Dakota Territories, who discover that something more horrible than Indians snatched the locals. It's a beautifully shot, intelligent film that owes more to John Ford's The Searchers or to Terence Malick than to modern scare flicks, and a brilliant example of cross-genre horror. The film got a little play at small film fests, where it was well received. But most of us have had to wait for DVD to discover that it even exists, which is a shame.
All of which raises an interesting question: Why don't more directors mix up the stale old conventions, and combine horror with other film genres?
Dawn Taylor

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400 Screens, 400 Blows is a weekly column that takes an in-depth look at the films playing below the radar, beneath the top ten, and on 400 screens or less.
State of Play (240 screens) continues playing this week, and despite its lukewarm performance and reviews, something about it makes me happy. In mid-2003, I got myself into hot water with a Russell Crowe fan club. I reviewed a very minor film called The Hard Word, starring Guy Pearce, who of course had been Crowe's co-star in L.A. Confidential (1997). I took the opportunity to compare the two actors, praising Pearce for his work in interesting films like Ravenous and Memento, and questioning the much more fashionable Crowe. I did this mainly because I was irritated at the enduring popularity of two terrible films, the sludgy, brooding mess Gladiator (2000) and the manipulative Oscar bait A Beautiful Mind (2001). I felt that Crowe went through the
Jeffrey M. Anderson

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