Duck Soup, arguably the Marx Brothers’ best film, is also one of the greatest anti-war movies ever made. Director Leo McCarey gave the picture a disciplined structure that still allowed his anarchistic stars plenty of room to wreak havoc, resulting in an absurdist comedy with an undercurrent of no-nonsense political commentary. This 1933 classic could be…
Considered one of his most overtly political films, this final Sergio Leone western is a melancholy action film steeped in memory. It looks to have influenced Leone collaborator Bernardo Bertolucci’s own politically charged historical epic, 1900. Peter Bogdanovich was originally contracted to direct but ankled when he bridled at having to imitate Leone’s baroque pictorial…
In 1963 writer Richard Matheson had a terrifying freeway run-in with a murderous trucker who tried to run his car off the road. In 1971 he turned the experience into a story published in Playboy. Some hold to the view that even so accomplished and award-winning a filmmaker as Steven Spielberg has never topped the…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies and many more at Trailers From Hell. This week we have wine pairings for a trio of Faye Dunaway films. It is tempting to just skip the wine and make a pitcher of Faye Dunaway cocktails instead. However, with six…
Before Christopher Nolan’s IMAX-size Dunkirk there was this 1958 version directed by Leslie Norman, a competent craftsman who was reportedly unpopular with film crews due to his impatience and volatile temper. Nonetheless he was behind the camera for such quality items as The Night My Number Came Up, X-the Unknown and The Long and the…
Christopher Nolan joins David Lean and Steven Spielberg in the war epic sweepstakes with this massive 70mm reenactment of the 1940 evacuation of British troops from war torn France. Headed by a cast of lesser known actors, the star power is in the supporting talent which includes Kenneth Branagh and Harry Styles. The Imax version…
Directed in 1970 by Roger Corman’s wizardly production designer, Daniel Haller, scored by Les Baxter and produced by Corman, Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson, The Dunwich Horror is an A.I.P. film through and through. Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 story and cowritten by Curtis Hanson, the film was to have starred Boris Karloff (featured in…
The Halloween franchise found itself in a moment of transition circa 1988. The two figures driving the series’ creative direction to that point, producer/director/writer/composer John Carpenter and producer/writer Debra Hill, had taken a surprise left turn in 1982. Rather than document the continued shenanigans of hulking insane asylum escapee Michael Myers, Carpenter and Hill wanted…
Roger must have liked this one, since he’s remade it twice over several decades. Apparently star Paul Birch had a rather physical disagreement with Corman on the front lawn of the Hollywood location and Birch, who had made several pictures with Roger, walked off the picture. His remaining scenes were completed with a double.
The second of Ray Harryhausen’s low budget Columbia series improves on It Came from Beneath the Sea thanks to a better screenplay by blacklisted Bernard Gordon and straightforward direction by the ever-employed Fred F. Sears. Unfortunately that tinny music is carried over, but it’s still a classic of 50s sci fi. For more behind-the-scenes info,…
A-listers Mark Robson, Jennings Lang and Mario Puzo (!) steal a leaf (and more) from the Irwin Allen playbook with this turgid smash hit about a devastating LA temblor which painstakingly copies stunt shots from The Poseidon Adventure. If not for the sternum-rattling sound effects of Sensurround, an alarming audio process that duplicates the trembling…
By the time he was nominated for Best Actor in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of the second half of John Steinbeck’s novel, James Dean was dead and buried. This was the only one of his starring vehicles to be released while he was alive. Reportedly Steinbeck felt the movie was as good or better than the…
Dennis Hopper’s counterculture classic started out as one more drive-in biker flick but morphed into something deeper, the right picture at the right time to sum up the 1960s and question the American Dream. Peter Fonda, in his Stars and Stripes leather jacket, represents every young person who was losing faith in that dream. A kick in…
First in the New World smashathon car chase series, made economically to say the least by vet Corman scribe Chuck Griffith. The ensuing wave of drive-in car crash pictures filled LA’s junkyards to overflowing with twisted metal. Allan lets us in on the secrets of New World trailerizing.
Under any of its myriad reissue titles, Tobe Hooper’s undeservedly obscure followup to his groundbreaking independent Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an intensely bleak, studio-bound Hollywood B-movie concoction. But it’s still bizarre and crazy and Neville Brand is on some other performance planet as the mad killer.
A dazzling tribute to one of Hollywood’s great eccentrics, Tim Burton’s black and white farce is manna for movie fans. The pitch-perfect cast is fronted by Johnny Depp as never-say-die director Ed Wood and Patricia Arquette as his true-blue wife Kathy. Bill Murray and Jeffrey Jones play two of Wood’s most memorable hangers-on but towering…
As big a hit as it was, this progenitor of Green Acres probably wouldn’t have been rereleased if supporting characters Ma and Pa Kettle hadn’t broken out and spawned nine more popular barnyard comedies.
Federico Fellini’s follow up to La Dolce Vita (and his last black-and-white movie) is the rare classic that rewards each viewing over a lifetime with new and different insights. A favorite of virtually every filmmaker, this exhilarating phantasmagoria was inspired by Fellini’s own creative block. “I am Guido,” he famously said of Marcello Mastroianni’s conflicted film director/hero whose expressionistic, circus-like world…
Another enormous Samuel L. Bronston historical spectacle with big stars (in this case, Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren) and epochal Euro production values, directed by the perennially underrated Anthony Mann, fresh from his being fired from Spartacus.
The second entry in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo trilogy is a virtual remake, ostensibly more playful and less a riposte to High Noon than the (better, let’s face it) original. Still a fun ride with Wayne and Mitchum having an obviously swell time in their only screen pairing, despite the fact that Wayne had Mitchum fired…
Though the title for this Argentianian film implies a supernatural thriller, it’s much scarier than that; Román Viñoly Barreto’s 1953 film is a brilliantly produced remake of Fritz Lang’s M and just as terrifying. Nathán Pinzón plays the shy professor with a penchant for murdering children and Olga Zubarry is the nightclub performer whose own…
Subtitled The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films, director Mark Hartley’s 2014 documentary is a treasure trove for 80’s movie nostalgists. Hartley puts together a remarkable band of over 80 Cannon vets (including Bo Derek, Elliott Gould and Dolph Lundgren) to tell their own stories while further embellishing the already outrageous legends of Cannon founders Menahem Golan and his cousin…
Dirty cops and determined drug dealers go head to head in Elite Squad 2, José Padilha’s explosive sequel to… Elite Squad. The simple plot line doesn’t disrupt Padilha’s game plan: a flurry of non-stop bullets and brawn that drive his real subject, the corruption of the Brazilian government. Starring Wagner Moura as Roberto Nascimento, one…
Directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Denis Sanders, Elvis – That’s the Way It Is records the singer’s return to the stage after a 13-year hiatus (not counting the great 1968 television special). Sanders commandeered eight Panavision cameras in and around Las Vegas’s International Hotel in August of 1970, capturing not only the King’s good-humored performance but…
The ghost of Jack London hovers over Robert Aldrich’s gutsy evocation of depression-era hobo gangs riding the rails and being targeted by sadistic railroad bulls. Keith Carradine’s character name, Cigaret, was the one used by London when he was on the road.
A late period entry in director Bert I. Gordon’s (Mr. B.I.G.) lifelong fascination with really big things. Here he tackles giant ants (who in turn tackle people) in a very loose adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel. Produced by the venerable Sam Arkoff for A.I.P., the movie stars Joan Collins and Robert Lansing, both…