Tonight's the night! Our esteemed cinephile Raincoaster is your hostess-with-the-mostest for the Klassy Manor Movie Night's presentation of "The Lair Of The White Worm," from Ken Russell, the legendary director who spent the 1960s and 70s treating the word "subtlety" like a personal insult. Depending on who you asked, his work was either a divine revelation or a fast track to excommunication. This was the era of "Women in Love," featuring the most famous nude wrestling match in history, "The Devils," a film so controversial it’s still being "found" in pieces, and "Tommy," the rock opera that proved Tina Turner and baked beans are a psychedelic match made in heaven. In later years, some critics claimed Russell had finally fallen off the deep end, yet others realized he was just doing backflips in the deep end. The 1980s saw him on a glorious, unhinged roll with  "Altered States," a  sci-fi trip where William H...

It's almost Halloween, the season of slasher movie pajama parties, or if we're to believe Gen Z gays, they're strictly gay slasher movie pajama parties. Why? Because "slasher movies are gay AF!" Which, I have to say, I find both adorable - oh, you cute li'l gays - and mildly annoying, if only because slashers have historically been openly misogynist and vaguely Republican with respect to sex, or rather, punishing anyone who was sexual, or had sex, particularly women, with deaths both gruesome and titillating. The prime example of this is arguably the first slasher, Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," the slashing death of Janet Leigh in the shower a  tour de force of masterful savagery and peek-a-boo nudity, and, yes, there's a cross-dressing villain played by Anthony Perkins, a closeted gay actor.  Low-budget mavens took Hitch's template and ran with it, creating a series of crude, slapped-together slashers which scant craftsmanship, much less...