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Edward D. Wood Jr. as Three Fears

Fear #1 - No matter how much I scream, no one will ever really hear me Every act is a communication and in genre cinema, the filmmaker is confined to strict parameters, where they are encouraged to frolic but not transgress. My stance, considering how much I have engaged with Ed Wood's work and criticisms of it, is that what caused audiences to sneer and mock his malformed creations was how close they were to resembling a 'real' movie. Wood did not intend to be avant-garde. He was no Kenneth Anger. He knew what a movie was and moulded one together through the disparate parts he had to hand and liberated the rest from the movies that raised him. My favourite entries in Wood's filmography are the horror pieces: Plan 9 From Outer Space , Bride Of The Monster , Revenge Of The Dead , Final Curtain , Meatcleaver Massacre . Hell, I even like Necromania , his horror-porn flick about a man who can't satisfy his wife and enlists the help of some satanic women with vague but d...
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Paul Schrader's Lost Highway, Or The Tragedy of Renee and Tara

I close my eyes to conjure up something But it's just a faint taste in my mouth - Dum Dum Girls, Coming Down  The reappraisal economy, as Jacob Lambert in an article for The Week puts it, is a recent phenomenon that has made it incredibly difficult to distinguish between a genuine admiration for an unfairly maligned piece of work and fodder for the dreaded think-piece machine, which seems to exist to garner clicks from polarising headlines. What is the function of trying to find clarity and meaning in work that has been firmly established as terrible, especially when the people who made it  turn out to have caused significant harm to others ?  The Canyons (2013) is a hard film to like.  It has a consistent yellow and green tinge, like stagnant pool water left to stew on the hottest day of the year. Everything is over-lit and cheap looking, empty and un-erotic . It's dry, garish and much too close to the sun. The dust settled on the cinema seats is hot to the tou...
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Expanding Time: A Foreword for MY MOTHER CALLED ME A HERMIT

If you're reading this, it means that my second poetry chapbook, MY MOTHER CALLED ME A HERMIT, is being released today. Unlike my first collection, which felt like a distillation of a depressed person soaking their brain in the internet during a moment of worldwide crises, these poems are very recent. I spent the last year of my life writing, editing and compiling them together. They are, in a sense, the most present version of my writing, which is a sentence I am typing out right now in this moment, a full 3 weeks before I intend to release it. I've thought a lot about the creative process as labour over the past couple of years. Living by myself, working full time and trying to squeeze anything artful from the few hours I have before I go to bed are all elements in this process, but more than that, they cost me time. Any time I don't spend writing something meaningful and cogent feels wasted. I feel the past on my back constantly and even doing something successfully brin...
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MY MOTHER CALLED ME A HERMIT

EVERYTHING IS DAMAGE  AND I'VE NEVER FELT MORE SANE THE WALLS WISH YOU A MERRY WHATEVER DAY WHEN THE KINGDOM COMES  I'LL HAVE SO MANY IMAGES OF CONNECTING SEAMS THAT I WON'T EVEN BE UNNERVED  BY THE BURNING SMELL I'VE THOUGHT ABOUT WOMANHOOD AS  A DESCENDING BOX THAT I'M PERPETUALLY HOVERING ABOVE ALONE-NESS IS THE ANTIDOTE TO A NERVOUS SKY I'VE NEVER FELT MY SKIN BUZZ LIKE THIS I WISH I’D MADE MY FRIENDS LAUGH MORE  BEFORE SEALING MYSELF IN THE CONTAINER BUT IT'S DONE NOW I'LL MAKE USE OF THE ROTATING CEILING  IT'S SPACE TO TUCK MYSELF INTO I'VE NEVER FELT GODLIER THAN THIS
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The Shrouds (2024) Broke My Brain

This is not a review. About a month ago, I saw The Shrouds (2024) in the cinema for the first time. After ruminating on it, posting a quick review to Letterboxd and eating some very mediocre sushi, I found myself, periodically crying throughout the rest of the evening and well into the early hours of the morning. This, unfortunately, ruined the unintentional double feature I did with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2024), a film I remember very little about, but have the vague sense that I did, in fact, like it. It wasn't for the lack of quality that the details of this fluffy little movie slipped away, but rather due to me having what I will euphemistically call a 'bad turn'. I do spiral. I've been known to dwell. I've sunk to depths of depression that I didn't think I was capabale of. I've been triggered by the innocuous and I've been triggered by the terrifying. I've spaced out for days and been knocked back to reality by something as mundane as a ...
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