Simon's Movie Reviews

I thoroughly enjoy cult movies as well as movies that colour outside the lines and Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) checks off those two boxes with a big fat checkmark. Like many cult movies it was a commercial failure when first released, which is not too surprising considering it is a comedy that deals with death, suicide and a romantic relationship between an 18-year-old man and a 79-year-old woman. Despite the grim subject matter it is an often funny, and yes, romantic movie. Unlike cult films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show I don’t think there are any midnight showings of Harold and Maude so it took me a while to even hear about it. I first read about it in Empire magazine and the premise definitely struck me as unique. You can easily pitch a movie about superheroes, spies, or romance, but how do you sell a movie about a senior citizen who steals police motorcycles and a young man who fakes elaborate suicides? Thanks to good old Netflix I managed to finally see it a...

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a movie can change a person. For me that movie was James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), a movie that made an action icon out of Sigourney Weaver after pitting her against an army of nightmarish creatures and their giant queen. This movie came out the year I was born and while I was growing up it increased in popularity achieving classic stardom as a science fiction, action and horror film. Unfortunately while I was growing up I must admit I was scared of most movie monsters, to the point that just the trailer for an Alien movie would make me nervous. Then I saw Cameron’s film and went to the dark side of the moon. Here’s the setting: it’s 2002 and my parents and I are living in Santiago, Chile. By then I haven’t seen any of the Alien films from beginning to end, but I have a general idea of what they do and how they tend to pop out of people’s chests. One evening I see that Aliens is about to start playing on a movie channel and I decide to tak...