There’s never been anything quite like it, before or since. Years in the making and more notable for its long term show biz fallout than its actual merits, this spectacularly mounted historical effusion is the very definition of the Troubled Production. There are many published treatises on the unmaking of this movie, none more insightful than harried producer Walter…
Folks not familiar with the wild and wacky ways of contemporary Chinese horror films, particularly those that add humor to the mix, will probably be asking for the license plate of the truck that just ran them over after experiencing Sammo Hung’s 1980 freak show. Hung’s film is emblematic of the bizarre, anything-goes aspect of…
Steven Spielberg was playing with house money after the enormous success of Jaws and he struck pay dirt again with this epic sci-fi fantasy chock-full of brilliantly composed panoramas and cracker-jack suspense scenes. Filming largely on the biggest indoor set ever constructed (inside a gigantic World War II dirigible hangar in Mobile, Alabama), CT3K races through its 137 minutes without breaking a sweat,…
Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer’s 2012 epic fantasy features a formidable cast who inhabit different characters as they wander through six different eras with each timeframe sporting a different plot. Luckily for the audience those tangled storylines seem to cohere by movie’s end. Jumping back and forth from the 18th century to the…
Before Battleship there was another movie based on a board game, and this one came with multiple endings, introducing the interactivity that has now become commonplace on the web after being pioneered in barely released features like Goodbye Cruel World. Director Jonathan Lynn’s debut feature was not especially popular, but it foreshadowed his run of…
Producer Roger Corman was certain Monte Hellman’s down home redneck version of The Hustler would be popular south of the Mason-Dixon line without realizing that cockfighting was a general market embarrassment by 1974. Here we have both the original trailer plus a somewhat desperate attempt to re-release it sans its basic gimmick.
Sexy Pam Grier poses as a hooker to wipe out some druglords and in the process becomes a full-fledged superstar in one of the most popular blaxploitation titles of the ’70s. Writer-director Jack Hill explains how it went down.
The appearance of a comet over California sends a simple dinner party into a surreal alternate universe rife with doppelgängers and hidden clues in James Ward Byrkit’s metaphysical mind game. Filmed over five nights in 2013, the movie earned praise for its intelligence and ambition—brilliance on a budget, if you will.
Nicotine addicted residents of a midwestern town try to give up smoking for a cash prize. This forgotten comic gem was TV titan Norman Lear’s only directorial effort. Shot in 1969, it went unreleased until 1971, when it proved to be a surprise hit. One of the darkest, most despairing social satires of the Nixon…
Noted moralist Al Zugsmith takes the directorial reins on this smutty followup to High School Confidential that pushes the envelope about as far as a 1960 studio picture could go, and emerges as pretty entertaining for mostly the wrong reasons. Steve Allen (!) is the crusading sex researcher who seems to find Mamie Van Doren…
Last and least of the notorious Blood Trilogy from “Godfather of Gore” H.G. Lewis. This sleaze favorite rips off the plot of Corman’s A Bucket of Blood, only this time the crazy artist needs more blood to paint his corpuscular canvases.
Made in 1968 and shelved for nearly two years, this is one of the most intelligent science fiction pictures of its decade, but it failed to find an audience. An updated remake has recently been announced. Could we really be worse off with a computer running everything?
Seven years before conducting a master class on the art of widescreen composition in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Sergio Leone made his credited directorial debut (he had previously stepped in to finish most of THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII when the original director fell ill) with this equally epic sword and sandal…
Dagger of the Mind, a Columbo episode from 1972 co-starring Richard Basehart, was treated to a theatrical release in Italy as Columbo Meets Scotland Yard. Though he sounds like Mastroianni in the trailer, Peter Falk still acts like the rumpled detective from Da Bronx.
The last of seven collaborations between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott (under Scott’s production company Ranown) is one of their best. Scott plays a (typically) lone gunman, a bounty hunter who specializes in retrieving women abducted by hostile tribesmen. The 62-year-old Scott made only one more movie after this, Sam Peckinpah’s lyrical tribute…
Director Elem Klimov’s powerful, near-surrealistic battle fantasia nearly made it into TFH’s “More Movies You Never Heard Of” category. The title is an invitation to view the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The movie, from the Soviet Union, is a fixture on many critics’ Ten Best of All Time lists. Its…
Second in the series of theatrical pastiches assembled by producer and film buff Robert Youngson that popularized forgotten giants of silent cinema. Moviegoers welcomed these hilarious glimpses into the past, even though Youngson framed them in such a nostalgic glow that some audiences left in sniffles.
Rip Torn plays a psychiatrist with more problems than his patients; the disturbed shrink secretly films sessions with his clients just before seducing them. Milton Moses Ginsberg staged the film in one room with one camera angle trained on Torn and his conquests, one of whom is Sally Kirkland. She and Torn give no-holds-barred performances…
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly nimble way with a wisecrack and Mark Lester’s crackerjack direction were just two of the reasons this action thriller stormed the box office in 1985. Ahhnuld plays former commando “John Matrix” who gets the AK out of mothballs for a South American showdown. No one needed steroids for this one, James Horner’s…
1971’s And Now for Something Completely Different was Monty Python’s first foray into feature filmmaking and the joke is that it is not “completely different” but very much the same: the movie is a compilation of short films based on the most popular set pieces from the hit television show that ran on BBC1 and…
A garishly violent slugfest for gore hounds and gym rats, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian is powered by equal parts blood and testosterone. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a sword slinging hulk out to avenge the slaughter of his parents at the hand of Thulsa Doom, a comically evil warlord played by James Earl Jones. Sandahl Bergman…
Albert Zugsmith’s shining moment in an amiably disreputable career that nonetheless included producing pix by Sirk, Welles and Jack Arnold. Only Fu Manchu is missing from this hypnotically retrograde yellow peril hallucination starring Vincent Price and half the Asian actors in Hollywood. Amazingly, in 1959 William Castle was originally set to shoot this in color…
One of Roger Corman’s most beloved 1950s drive-in double-bill quickies. A pointy-headed alien from Venus moves into a cave in Bronson Canyon and mind-controls nearby scientists in time-honored fashion. Sci fi stalwarts Peter Graves and Beverly Garland risk their lives for us all.
Although it stirred little notice on its US release in 1968, the late Michael Reeves’ final film (of three and a half) has attained deservedly classic status as one of the darkest, most bleak historical treatments of human ignorance and misery on film. Price plays a true historical character, although the real one was much…
Star-gazer George Pal’s infatuation with scientifically accurate depictions of our interplanetary future came to an end with this ill-starred venture which ended up playing second feature bookings. It’s ambitious and full of spectacle, but dramatically it’s pretty primitive. The studio tried to recoup their losses by fashioning a tv pilot around the fx sequences called Destination Space,…
Renewed interest has been sparked lately in Steven Soderbergh’s prescient 2011 thriller which tracks the spread of a virus. As in previous disaster thrillers like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, it features a sprawling all-star cast. Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon and Kate Winslet are among those giving stellar performances. Scott Z. Burns screenplay received high praise…