No Bondage, No More: ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’
By Eve Tushnet
I first heard about the X-Ray Spex from a Riot Grrrl flier handed out at punk concerts in the mid-’90s. Their one album, Germfree Adolescents, was on a list of woman-led punk music…
The Lonely, Horny Prophecies of Lynne Tillman’s ‘Weird Fucks’
By Sam Moore
What’s prescient about Weird Fucks is how everything both is and isn’t a matter of life and death; violence is an undercurrent, and every breakup may or may not be the end of the world…
Big Tech, Nostalgia, and Control: Grafton Tanner’s ‘The Circle of the Snake’
I’m sure many members of Generation X have taken a moment to look around the pop culture landscape over the past decade and a half and had a sudden moment of realization: there are certainly a whole lot of people trying to sell me things using the media of my youth…
“A Peculiar State of Poise”: Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Lathe of Heaven’
Le Guin was always ambivalent about revolution, and especially about revolutionary violence…
Hell Is for Children: The Revolutionary Politics of ‘The Omen’
The Omen is generally considered a bleak film because the devil wins. But it’s even bleaker as a picture of who the devil is supposed to be, and what kind of measures are needed to defeat him…
Tubular Terrors: ‘Invitation to Hell’
Invitation to Hell definitely follows on well-trod thematic ground, examining the American nuclear family’s impulse to conform and keep up with the Joneses in suburbia. But it’s on the execution, in the casting, and in a few of the left-field plot developments that the film really shines…
Tubular Terrors: ‘Cruise Into Terror’
By K.E. Roberts
World-weary Captain Andrews (Hugh O’Brian) never smiles, but he is especially not smiling today. The company’s luxury liner was overbooked, you see, and he’s been ordered to take eight passengers 800 miles to Mexico on a busted up “battle wagon” (in fact a midsized pleasure boat decorated with ferns)…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The House That Bled to Death’ and ‘Snowbeast’
Apologies in advance to any fellow child of the UK who might be reading this, because for a Brit of my generation, choosing The House That Bled to Death as exemplar of British TV horror is a bit like announcing that your favorite novel is Moby Dick or your favorite food is pizza…
Dead Shells and Black Plaques: ‘The English Heretic Collection’
Using as its inspiration English Heritage, who preserve the very bones and sinews of English feudal hierarchy in the form of the nation’s stately homes and historical sites, Sharp’s English Heretic project seeks to détourne these edifices of authority…
Sister Lovers: The Curse of Queerness in ‘Ginger Snaps’
The tragedy of Ginger Snaps, in fact, is that patriarchy makes queerness unspeakable and unthinkable. As a result, the film can imagine no future for women in patriarchy other than death…
We Are the Mutants 