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…
Perhaps Jean-Luc Godard’s most accessible feature, Contempt is almost conventional in the way it describes the disintegration of the marriage between a bored trophy wife (Brigitte Bardot) and her ineffectual husband. Michel Piccoli plays the well-meaning screenwriter who is about to lose his beautiful playmate to an arrogant producer played by Jack Palance. Godard’s cool-as-a-cucumber…
Lalo Schifrin was known for combining disparate musical genres but mixing bluegrass and symphonic music for Stuart Rosenberg’s comedy/drama posed a new challenge—it worked, Schifrin received an Oscar nomination. Paul Newman’s signature role has been a bit overshadowed by the ubiquity of Florida prison camp commandant Strother Martin’s much quoted and parodied line, “What we…
Fueled by a dyn-o-mite soundtrack featuring The Supremes, Cooley High begins as a joyride and ends in tragedy, though one that carries a redemptive quality for one of the main characters. Helmed by Michael Schultz, the film blasted open the door to the director’s own cycle of low-budget/big box office films about the African-American experience including…
Ralph Bakshi’s nervy satire on race relations courted controversy from all sides, beginning with its in-your-face title (which Bakshi himself objected to) and its incendiary use of African-American stereotypes to score its satirical points. The 1975 film, a mix of live action and animation, referenced a wide range of black-cultural hot buttons including Song of…
Squint your eyes and you’ll see a Scorsese film in director James Mangold’s 1997 crime drama co-starring Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro. Sylvester Stallone stars in this Serpico-like story about one good cop surrounded by a bunch of bad apples. Stallone won praise for his performance and his De Niro-esque commitment to…
Boris Karloff pairs with Christopher Lee and a top cast for an atmospheric period piece whose seriousness belies its lurid title. made in 1958 back-to-back with The Haunted Strangler, but unreleased until 1962. Originally titled The Doctor of Seven Dials. Trailer narrator Art Gilmore is very excited about it.
In the tradition of The Corpse Vanishes and Eyes Without a Face, this sleazoid classic casts Peter Cushing as a mad Swinging Sixties London surgeon who dismembers screaming women for their pituitary glands to restore the beauty of his disfigured fiancee. Despite the sordid surroundings Cushing gives his usual all-out performance. A longer, even scuzzier…
For decades this small-scale programmer, like the title character, was hard to see. Then a few years ago it turned up on video and pretty much put everybody to sleep. John Carradine plays yet another misunderstood alien who turns out to be a good guy after all. Narrator Paul Frees seems to find it all…
Courtesy of a script by Cormac McCarthy, Ridley Scott’s 2013 thriller veers wildly between over-the-top satire reminiscent of Terry Southern at his most indelicate and grimly ghoulish violence ala McCarthy’s own No Country For Old Men. The stellar cast, who seem down for anything, includes Michael Fassbender as the slightly honorable lawyer to an extremely…
Originally intended as a soft-core sex picture, this popular 1970 indie was picked up by AIP, which re-submitted it several times to the MPAA to get its initial X/R rating reduced to PG. The late Robert Quarry made his mark as the bloodsucking Count, reprising the role in the bigger-budgeted sequel/remake, The Return of Count…
For many people today comic Danny Kaye is an acquired taste, but love him or hate him, this elaborate costume spoof is his funniest movie. One of the cleverest comedy scripts of the period excels in witty dialog and hilarious situations, very little of which seems to have made it into this conventionally bland trailer.
Mark Pellington has a very personal take on this bracingly unschmaltzy Vincente Minnelli domestic drama which is both more realistic and more emotional than the popular tv series it spawned.
The always-idiosyncratic Bruce Dern achieves a new level of screen villainy as the stringy-haired cattle-thief psychopath in Mark Rydell’s out-of-the-ordinary John Wayne vehicle. Controversial in its day, it’s one of Wayne’s best latter-day projects, seemingly designed as a kind of swan song– but that actually came several years later with The Shootist. Followed by a…
No, it’s not this Crash. Or this one either! It’s Charles Band’s seldom seen 1977 haunted car movie with an all-star drive-in movie cast and plenty of smashing, crashing car wrecks, all for under $100K and beating the big-studio version,THE CAR, out by several months. As an added bonus, after the commentary Dave Decoteau takes us on a “making-of”…
Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance turns what sounds like a typical country-western biography—too much booze and too many cheatin’ hearts—into an unusually poignant film. Directed and written by first-timer Scott Cooper, this surprise hit is buoyed by a first-rate cast including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell, and Robert Duvall. T-Bone Burnett co-wrote the film’s score and Oscar-winning…
“Oscar-winner Cloris Leachman” falls face first into a wedding cake in this zippy trailer for Jonathan Demme’s second directorial outing about a 1950s family crime spree. Believe it or not, this was originally conceived as a time-travel sequel to Big Bad Mama with Shirley Clarke directing!
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the Creature’s first appearance. He was the last of the great Universal monsters, sporting a brilliant man-in-suit design that can’t be beat and has resisted years of attempted remakes and redesigns. Creature from the Black Lagoon is the most iconic of the now-classic Jack Arnold/William Alland sci-fi pix…
Roger Corman’s goofiest movie didn’t play many theaters in 1961 but found its audience during the following decade on late nite TV Creature Features. More off-kilter fun from writer Chuck Griffith. The third lead, billed as Edward Wain, is Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne!
This was the US title of the Hammer screen version of Nigel Kneale’s six-part BBC sci fi serial THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, which had been a nationwide smash and led to three feature film sequels. Director Val Guest shoots in a flat newsreel style that imparts a semi-documentary, almost newsreelish quality to the proceedings. Since restored…
With a slightly heftier budget and his first big-name cast, George Romero teams up with Stephen King for a quintet of E.C.-like comic book chillers that Really Do Look Like Comic Books!
Brilliantly photographed by Bergman’s longtime cameraman Sven Nykvist, this 1972 film about the psychological gamesmanship among three sisters and their faithful servant was an arthouse hit even though initial distributors were loathe to pick it up – it fell to Roger Corman and New World Pictures to give Bergman’s film the boost it needed.
Mick Garris’ slapstick sci-fi opus is the second in a quartet of Critters movies that popped up in the wake of the success of Gremlins. In this installment the citizens of the unassuming town of Grover’s Bend, Kansas suffer yet another infestation of the preposterously toothy aliens and band together to snuff them out. Screenwriter…
Compromised by a dwindling budget and production Euro-chaos, Peckinpah was not completely satisfied with this WW II story of a German unit at the Russian front in 1943. The climax was literally improvised by James Coburn and Maximillian Schell when the money ran out. But Peckinpah once claimed that “I had a telegram from Orson…
Ralph Macchio plays a Juilliard student on the trail of legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson and Joe Seneca is a grizzled harpist who knows more about the near-mythical musician than he’s letting on. Walter Hill directed this trip to the crossroads from a script by John Fusco who wrote it as a class assignment at…