The Maze is proud to present an excerpt from my essay Portrait in Flesh: The Brains, Heart, and Guts of Brian Yuzna—part of Re-Animator 40, the companion book included with Ignite’s Ultimate Limited Edition and Deluxe Edition Box Sets. I have a long history with Brian’s movies, and you can see in the videos below I’ve spent a long time watching and considering his work and his place in the culture.

This past weekend I traveled by train up to Boston for the wonderful Boston Underground Film Festival, a staple of the local film scene, and one of the finest most wonderfully raucous places to enjoy genre cinema. Amongst exciting new titles like Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys and Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight, our brand new sparkling 4K restoration of Stuart Gordon’s deliciously depraved Re-Animator got to play for an appreciative and packed house.

The Maze editor-in-chief Scout Tafoya’s latest book The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader is available now at Amazon and at Scout’s patreon. The book pieces together a year’s worth of writing on the greatest B-movie director of all time, who also happened to become an A picture director, a maker of epics so enormous you can’t see where they begin or end. Here a preview of the book, the entry on his 1948 rescue job on the Alfred L. Werker movie He Walked By Night with Richard Basehart, who would become a key player in Mann’s ensemble, and which inspired...

Impressionistic and moving, The Story of G.I. Joe is a war film with the kind of hard-won poignancy that could only come from the brusque romanticism of a war vet filmmaker like William A. Wellman. Released in June 1945 - a month after V-E day but before the war in the Pacific had finished, American audiences and critics alike responded to this tough-but-sensitive portrayal of the grim realities of the combat soldier, particularly given that many of the real infantrymen sent to the Pacific shortly after production ended did not live to see the finished picture. That sad fact was...

    A personal, poetic reflection on a personal, poetic movie by programmer, director, and critic Gina Telaroli. Based on the writings of Ernie Pyle, an Americana columnist turned World War II correspondent, and specifically adapted from Pyle’s writings about his time following US infantrymen in in Italy and North Africa, William A. Wellman’s Story of G.I. Joe (1945) starts slowly and cryptically as a group of soldiers in an unidentified landscape load onto the back of a truck and drive towards what could very likely be their death. As they drive away, truck after truck after truck filled with...

By Caden Mark Gardner   William A. Wellman’s best-known World War II pictures, The Story of G.I. Joe and Battleground remain touchstones in his prolific filmography.  While many wartime and postwar films on World War II have faded from public memory, what gives these films a sense of timelessness is the fact beyond the action sequences of each there is a specific attention paid to lived experiences of these men in battle.  The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) and Battleground (1949) are defined by the films being ensemble pieces about a collective, united front that spotlights the lives of these...