Budd Wilkins

Greensboro

Professional Film Critic at Slant Magazine

Professional Film Critic at Freelance

Professional film critic & historian writing for @VideoWatchdog, @Slant_Magazine, and other publications.

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Articles

Rarities Collection Volume 2' Blu-ray Review

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Following up on its 2022 collection House of Psychotic Women, Severin Films has released a second compendium of films centered around angst-ridden women going about their often-unhinged business.
'Motorpsycho' and 'Up!' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Severin Films

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Severin continues their good work in bringing hitherto largely unavailable Russ Meyer titles to home video in glorious new 4K restorations. Their latest releases are Motorpsycho, a gritty genre mashup that’s been unjustly dismissed as merely a “dry run” for the better known Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and the late-period gonzo comedy Up!, involving, among other things, leather gimp masks and an orgy-loving Adolf Hitler.
'Don't Torture a Duckling' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Arrow Video

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling is a haunting depiction of a series of child murders. It’s also something of a rare bird within the giallo genre, as it doesn’t take place in an urban setting (think the second half of Sergio Martino’s Torso), and the shocking subject matter could be considered fairly radical for early-’70s Italy, given the repressive climate of the era fostered by religious institutions and political regimes.
The Criterion Collection

2 months ago | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Arthur Penn’s Night Moves is one of the great revisionist noirs, taking its place alongside Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Like those films, it not only brazenly subverts the tropes of the classic Hollywood private eye film, but also uses the genre’s pervasive aura of moral corruption and social anomie to comment on the American scene in the wake of political scandals and the collapse of the 1960s counterculture into the rampant self-absorption of the Me Decade.
'The 10th Victim' Blu-ray Review: Kino Lorber

2 months ago | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Genre-hopping maverick Elio Petri’s half-mod, half-madcap ’60s mindbender is set in a dystopian society obsessed with a government-sponsored game known as “The Big Hunt” that pits volunteer hunters against victims in mortal combat.
'Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians' Blu-ray Review

2 months ago | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Between 1964 and 1981, Oldřich Lipský and Jiří Brdečka collaborated on a loose trilogy of films, each of which paid loving, yet subversive, homage to a strain of pop culture that would’ve been seen as hopelessly disreputable by the Communist authorities in the former Czechoslovakia. Lemonade Joe is a tribute to the John Ford western, while Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet tinkers with the conventions of the private eye film.
'The Golden Fern' Blu-ray Review: Deaf Crocodile

2 months ago | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Czech writer-director Jiří Weiss’s The Golden Fern is a dark and haunting fairy tale, albeit one that’s grounded in an earthy naturalism. Rather than lean heavily into the surreal, as these films often do, Weiss subtly weaves elements of the magical or miraculous into an otherwise straightforward narrative, thereby cannily introducing aspects of the uncanny. As for the moral lessons implicit in the story, The Golden Fern touches on weighty themes of arrogance, ingratitude, and infidelity.
'The Outcasts' Blu-ray Review: Deaf Crocodile

Mar 7, 2025 | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Robert Wynne-Simmons’s The Outcasts is a haunting and ultimately melancholy study of social ostracization and rebellion that takes place in rural Ireland sometime before the potato famine of 1845. The film felicitously combines an almost documentarian concern for the folkways of the peasants who till the muddy earth and the delicately wrought magical elements found in an Irish folk tale.
The Criterion Collection

Mar 4, 2025 | slantmagazine.com | Budd Wilkins

Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance was shot in July 1968, but its release was postponed by a skittish Warner Bros. until August 1970. The timing couldn’t have been better, since the film not only perfectly encapsulates Swinging London’s faith in “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” but also effectively hammers the last nail in the counterculture’s coffin.
The Conversation Reviews

Feb 27, 2025 | metacritic.com | Francis Ford Coppola |Budd Wilkins |A.A. Dowd

Unfortunately, it appears with every passing day that the great American paranoid political thrillers of the 60's and 70's, with its strongest work bookended by 'The Manchurian Candidate' (eerily foreseeing the JFK assassination) and 'All the President's Men' (placing a coda of closure on the Watergate scandal), simply haven't aged a day, and are as timely as ever in conceptualizing the palpable fear that ordinary citizens have in those in control of their destinies, namely the police and...