Beach Blanket Boner
Personally, I hate the beach. It’s hot. Sand gets up your ass. It’s just so goddamn boring lying there on a towel waiting for a tan line to kick in. Some days just a whiff of Coppertone in the air…
Read more
Author Archive: Dennis Dermody
Extra Special
One of my many cockamamie jobs was once selling roses on the streets of New Orleans in the 1970s. I had a little cart on the corner of Iberville and Bourbon Street where I sold bouquets of ludicrously priced posies…
Read more
Nico, 1988
Opening this week at the newly renovated Film Forum (209 Houston Street) is a stunning bio-pic of the thorny later days of former Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico (played with blazing fury by Danish actress Trine Dyrholm). Focusing on the rocky…
Read more
Favorite Movie Brats
W. C. Fields was famed for saying “I’ve never met a child I liked.” And, while I rather like whiny, needy, hyperactive little handfuls in real life, on screen I like them best when they’re just plain rotten. The kind…
Read more
Music To My Fears
In searching relentlessly through the trash can of film history, I tracked down three music-related films that were so cracked I needed to write about them: Young Toscanini is a 1988 film by Franco Zeffirelli starring C. Thomas Howell…
Read more
Love Me Deadly
What can you say about a 1972 film concerning a pretty, blonde L.A. socialite (who’s secretly a necrophiliac) which also co-stars Lyle Waggoner (of The Carol Burnett Show fame)? Well that’s what you get, and more, in the gloriously deranged…
Read more
Bad Acid Cinema
I recently re-watched the Blu-rays of Psych-Out and The Trip and was instantly plunged back into the era of free love, bell bottoms, sandals, love beads and frugging in a disco under a strobe light. It also made me realize…
Read more
Sublimely Stupid Monsters
Kids know there are monsters in the world. They see it constantly on TV that there are dark forces at work out there. And now, with the rash of school shootings, it’s upsetting to imagine children spending their entire youth…
Read more
The Forest & The Five (2 Suspenseful Series On Netflix)
Two great series are streaming now on Netflix- The Forest, a wonderfully atmospheric French 6-episode series about the police investigation of some missing girls. And The Five, a 10 -episode British series created by mystery writer Harlan Coben about the…
Read more
The Trouble With Angels
I saw an angel once. It was in the 1970’s- my first summer in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. I consumed several bad clams, got hepatitis and turned the color of a stick of Land O’Lakes butter. One morning, half-crazed with…
Read more