Original Cinemaniac

Author Archive: Dennis Dermody

Ray & Liz

            Photographer Richard Billingham made a name for himself with alarming autobiographical photos of his family- his alcoholic father and obese, tattooed mother in England. This film expands on that by plunging the audience into the squalid house, with Liz…
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Videocy

            In the 80s one of my closest friends organized a surprise birthday party where my friends chipped in to buy me a VCR. Those were in the days when the machines were big, clunky top loaders. They also bought…
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Kick-Ass Girl Gang Movies

Bad girl films have always inspired me. And in exploitation movies there’s nothing more fun than girl gang films. There, the filmmakers could push all the sex, violence and hard-boiled dialogue and disguise it as feminism while actually titillating drive-in…
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More Gay Rockers On Screen

            Bohemian Rhapsody was such a behemoth at the box office, it’s hardly surprising studios would greenlight another movie about a gay rocker- this summer it’s Elton John in Rocketman– hoping for another megahit. And I hear a Boy George…
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Father Knows Worst

            I remember hitchhiking to Connecticut to visit my father in the hospital. My mother had called to tell me that he was riddled with cancer. When I walked into his hospital room he looked up and sardonically said, “Well…
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