Jeremiah Kipp

The freewheeling atmosphere of dread more than make up for the incoherence, but Phantasm IV: Oblivion at times feels like an expensive, 35mm home movie made by some kids in their backyard.

What makes Phantasm special is the way it captures a boy's life in 1978. [Remastered]

It is boldly NC-17, but unlike most exploitation cinema, Ferrara can’t seem to help himself from making the film a personal, frightened psychic diary, a pitiful shriek for help, and a powerful statement about how even the damned can achieve a moment of fleeting grace.

The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed.

A stark, eerie and unrelenting parable of dread. There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.

Dickey taps into that stark mortal terror of abandoning control, where to become a wild man is somehow a form of connection.

If you watch Clockwork Orange and see that this is the game Kubrick is playing with us, giving us an avenue into understanding a corrosion of society, the film may be appreciated as his finest masterwork in a career full of them. Certainly, it’s his most human film, right next to Lolita in its refusal to judge its central character’s sickness.

Add Hepburn’s persona, beautifully explored here in all its wonder, and Stewart’s likeability, and George Cukor’s sensible, subtle, and lovingly unrushed direction of a firecracker script…the result is a studio picture far deeper and richer than its whimsical surface style might lead you to believe.

The exhaustive, labyrinthine narrative is built up like a fortress around this film’s bitter heart.

The film doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer as it reminds us of our culpability as spectators.