Motion Picture Purgatory - Comic Strip Reviews by Rick Trembles

Movie reviews are traditionally presented as newspaper or magazine articles… or broadcast via radio or television. Well, cartoonist Rick Trembles took it upon himself to try something a bit different and do his iconoclastic movie reviews in the form of a comic strip… which he does on a weekly basis. The strip is called “Motion Picture Purgatory” and has been featured every week since 1998 in the free weekly The Montreal Mirror.

Trembles hails from Montreal, Quebec in Canada. He has tried his hand at comic books, punk rock and other forms of self-expression but he seems to have found his true calling in this weekly strip which allows him to indulge in his two favorite pastimes: drawing and watching movies. Trembles can write, too… and even if his strip were done strictly as a prose piece it would be worth looking at. He strings real and made-up words together in some of the most convoluted verbal labyrinths that you have ever had to untangle (“Impossible impregnations Promulgate puerile profundities” is used to describe “Being John Malkovich”) and, boy, does he love his alliteration! (“Patronizing Poltergeisting Pabulum” is what he dubs 1999’s “The Haunting.”)

Trembles’ taste in movies seems to skew towards the more extreme types of sci-fi and horror. He’s quite fond of old school animation (Ray Harryhausen and the like) and the best of George A. Romero and pretty much anything that looks like it had any intelligence attached to it. Every now and then, however, he tortures himself by taking in something like “The Rugrats Movie”… just to keep abreast of the current trends in animation, I suppose. Bless Rick Trembles… for he will brave the mainstream theaters to see these movies so that you won’t have to!