California’s entire earthquake fault line goes haywire, with 9-point-plus shocks on the Jerry Lee Lewis Rigor Mortis scale! The geological wipeouts include Boulder Dam, downtown Los Angeles and most of the San Francisco peninsula. This expensive-looking Dwayne Johnson disaster spectacle looks sensationally good, with excellent 3-D effects and nearly wall-to-wall fun effects work, even if…
July 25, 1980. That was the day Dressed to Kill opened in theaters across the country, and it marked the first of countless times I would see the movie projected on a big screen, on a drive-in screen, panned and scanned for home video, even interrupted and cut to ribbons for network TV. But I’ll…
Warners answers the call for Hammer horror with four nifty thrillers starring the great Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The transfers are immaculate — Technicolor was never richer than this. The only drawback is that Chris Lee’s Dracula has so few lines of dialogue. On hi-def, Cushing’s Frankenstein movie is a major re-discovery as well. Horror Classics: Four Chilling Movies from…
G.W. Pabst’s silent German classic is intact, restored and looking great. Louise Brooks is the virginal innocent betrayed on every level of the sexual double standard. Brooks is nothing less than amazing, with a performance that doesn’t date, and Pabst only has to show how things are to make a statement about societal hypocrisy. German cinema…
Ready for more Anthony Mann? This light comedy thriller / borderline noir leans on amnesia for a plot hook and to motivate an all-night prowl on the streets of Los Angeles the RKO back lot. Tom Conway and Ann Rutherford star, but the real thrill is in the secondary female leads — Jean Brooks from the…
Welcome to the weird, irresistible world of Republic Serials, an art form with rules of content and conduct that resemble no other movies, nor any reality we know. “The Phantom Ruler” has plans for world conquest, so get ready for a punch-out every five minutes and a terrific Lydecker miniature special effect in almost every…
Get your beret and warm up the espresso! Some of the most famous deep-dish art film is here — in HD — from attempts to translate various art ‘isms’ to the screen, to graphics-oriented abstractions, to ‘city symphonies’ to the dream visions of Maya Deren and beyond. The careful remasters reproduce proper projection speeds and original music….
A look at the list of my favorite movies from 2014 reveals the presence of six extraordinary nonfiction films, and that’s just a taste of the seeming hundreds of docs released last year– not all of them extraordinary, of course, but all of them indicative of a trend toward the making of the availability of…
Welcome to part 2 of this week’s TFH Movie Challenge! Be sure to click submit for your score!
Take a trip into political art history: the state-run East German film company DEFA uses the experiences of Communist artists to promote the party line and educate young people on the sacrifices of the past. Some of the personal stories are incredible, and the art covered is indeed very impressive — writers, illustrators, a…
Scream favorites Vincent Price and Christopher Lee become tangled in an African curse, grave robbing, a premature burial and a clutch of throat-slashings — yet the two stars have no real scenes together. Steve Haberman’s well-researched and insightful commentary tells the story of Gordon Hessler’s first production for the English arm of American-International Pictures, a…
The latest release of Lon Chaney’s most famous silent classic is a Blu-ray, which allows us to marvel at at the actor’s artistry in a beautifully tinted HD image. Erik the Phantom is one of the two or three greatest fantasy makeup performances of all time. The release has three separate encodings, of different…
What would seem the perfect project for tough-guy director Robert Aldrich still commands a high reputation with some. Ambitious top-dog hobo Lee Marvin squares off against Ernest Borgnine’s nearly demonic railroad conductor who routinely murders bums that dare to hitch a ride. The mayhem culminates in a battle on a moving flat car, between Ernie’s…
The advertising promised a surfeit of sleaze — but the film is a superior thriller about a real-life, low-rent serial killers from back in the late 1940s. Tony Lo Bianco and the great Shirley Stoler are Ray and Martha, mixed-up lovers running a Merry Widow racket through the personals ads in romance magazines. Leonard Kastle’s…
Welcome to this week’s TFH Movie Challenge! This week we’re headed to the wrong side of the tracks with some classic movie mobsters! Be sure to click submit for your score!
Welcome to Part Two of our “Sex in the Cinema” movie challenge. Enjoy! Be sure to click submit for your score!
About five years ago I made my way over to Montana Street in Santa Monica to attend a screening of the magnificently loopy adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven, which was showing at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. The screening was a star-studded affair, featuring Verhoeven in an on-stage interview…
Techno-thriller fans have been waiting a long time for a good disc of action ace John Sturges’ sci-fi espionage suspenser. George Maharis, Richard Basehart, Anne Francis and Dana Andrews must stop a madman who has snatched a full set of deadly bio-warfare viruses from a super-secret government lab. Each flask can wipe out an entire…
Robert Enrico’s literally searing terror tale from the French occupation is not for the faint of heart. Fearing reprisals, surgeon Philippe Noiret sends his wife Romy Schneider out of harm’s way of the retreating Germans — but things go horribly wrong. What follows is an ordeal of vengeance even more brutal than Straw Dogs,…
First-time director Richard Wilson’s B&W ’50s western is different. Robert Mitchum is on-task as a town tamer with believable problems, both in exterminating gunslingers Claude Akins and Leo Gordon, and with making peace with his estranged wife, Jan Sterling. That’s not to mention Mitchum’s attraction for pacifist Karen Sharpe, and ditzy showgirl Barbara Lawrence. And…
Brian Trenchard-Smith’s outrageous futuristic gore-fest imagines an Australian extermination camp run by the sadistic Michael Craig and Roger Ward, where jaded rich folk come to hunt human prey. The leading targets for this week’s jaunt are Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey. It is snarky? Is it subversive? An alternate title was Blood Camp Thatcher! Turkey…
John Huston sets the bar for director-driven quality filmmaking of the early 1970s. Stacy Keach is a punchy boxing bum who teams up with the ambitious newcomer Jeff Bridges; the glowing discovery is the amazing Susan Tyrell, film history’s most convincingly caustic floozy-alcoholic, bar none. Her voice can peel paint, but we love her dearly….
Welcome to this week’s TFH Movie Challenge! This week it’s all about the birds, the bees and the movies! Enjoy! Be sure to click submit for your score! You can take Part Two of the quiz right here!
“This 1966 western… has the expertise of a cold old whore with practiced hands and no thoughts of love. There’s something to be said for this kind of professionalism; the moviemakers know their business and they work us over. We’re not always in the mood for love or for art, and this movie makes no…
Welcome to Part Two of our Movie Challenge about movies and the comic books that inspired them. Enjoy! Be sure to click “submit” to get your score!
How did this sneak by? It’s a combo escapist spy story, engrossing soap opera, and historically accurate Cold War flashback to the time of Duran Duran and Blondie, produced in Germany with a great cast of young and/or unfamiliar actors. Sure, the expected unlikelihoods are there, but so is an essential authenticity. Great fun! Deutschland…