Andy

Set in the 1980s Perth suburbs, Ben Young’s Hounds of Love centers on a sadistic husband and wife duo, John and Evelyn White (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth), who kidnap, torture, and murder young high school girls. Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings) is the White’s latest quarry. Drugged and restrained to a bed she desperately searches for an escape while her separated parents search for her.

The 1933 King Kong is many things. Like any piece of cultural history the film can be framed in various conversations privileging or critiquing its qualities. It’s a cinematic tour-de-force in special effects. It’s a myth-making vehicle that achieved a kind of cultural iconography equaled in cinema only by movie stars, Westerns, Star Wars, Samurai movies, the early 1930s run of Universal monster movies, etc.

James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi thriller The Abyss took audiences to the steely blue depths of the Caribbean where the film’s plucky, devil-may-care bunch of oil riggers (in these movies aren’t they all?) square off sub-a-sub with a rogue SEAL team. Cameron’s film represents one of the final contemporaneous Cold War allegories in mainstream U.S. cinema. Though multiple edits and a ballooning budget kept the film from financial success it’s stark verisimilitude coupled with groundbreaking special effects endeared it to many critics.