Kronos (1957): Kurt Neumann's movie has some rather interesting ideas and features a lovely cubist giant monster, but gets dragged down again and again by an inability to escape the conventions of 50s SF/horror movies. The film is far from being an unwatchable mess but I find it rather irritating when a movie shies away from using its full degree of imagination (something a movie concerning a giant, energy-sucking robot thing surely possesses, particularly one that's casting Morris Ankrum as a psychiatrist instead of a general) only to follow genre conventions that are just not very interesting. If you're able to watch the film that's actually there, and have a tolerance for this sort of thing, you'll probably enjoy yourself enough, though, because Neumann and co surely are competent at what they are doing.
American Mary (2012): This, on the other hand, is on quite a different quality level. Unfortunately, Jen and Sylvia Soska's film is one of those films I don't really have to say anything of interest about, apart from obvious stuff like "it's really fantastic" and "is Katherine Isabelle great here, or what!?", so you know, it's really fantastic, and Katharine Isabelle is particularly great in it.
Il Prato Macchiato Di Ross aka The Bloodstained Lawn (1973): Riccardo Ghione's horror-based satire on the doubtful charms of the bourgeoisie suffers from a rather sluggish pace, a lack of actual incisive satire, and a certain lack of imagination in its direction. It's a bit of a shame too, because whenever Ghione (also responsible for the screenplay) manages to move his eye from the obvious towards the weird, his film awakens to life. It's too bad that a rather tepid and soft-footed approach dominates the film, for in the hands of someone more (intellectually and visually) daring, this could have been quite the film. As it stands, it's a somewhat interesting curio.
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