One of the greatest newspaper pictures ever (can there be many more in our future?), Howard Hawks’ gender-bending remake of The Front Page stands as a comedy classic. Its improvisational-sounding overlapping dialog still impresses as modernistic. Such stars as Ginger Rogers, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert turned down Rosalind Russell’s revamped…
Director Sidney J. Furie specialized in brainy action films and his 1973 revenge fantasy starring Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor is no different. The duo plays two former military men who go rogue with a plan to wipe out a drug-dealing kingpin and his gang. Furie assembled an eclectic cast and crew including Gwen…
Alvin Rakoff’s black comedy was almost banned – not by overzealous censors but by its own star Peter Sellers who felt the role of a lonely businessman blackmailing a young woman was too close to his own personality. Sinéad Cusack plays the object of Sellers’ misguided affections. Adapted from a play with the squirm-inducing title…
Ok, so there’s no ghost–but this is one of the best Abbott & Costello movies, with the boys mixed up with gangsters, haunted houses and stolen loot. Besides, what could be scarier than the Andrews Sisters?
Director Christine Hornisher’s film pushes all the grindhouse buttons in this mash-up of serial killers and sex workers. Christopher Augustine plays a Hollywood hopeful who dreams of being a cinematographer but can only find work shooting bottom of the barrel porn loops. Released in 1973 the film was re-released as The Hollywood Hillside Strangler. 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 a trio of movies that expose the soft underbelly of Tinseltown, our own private Hollywood Babylon. And what Babylon would be complete without a wine to go with it?…
Producer Jon Davison takes us through the hurry-up production of one of the last of Roger Corman’s “three girls” drive-in exploitation pictures in which nubile nurses, teachers or in this case starlets have semi-clothed adventures around LA for 80 minutes or so. Enthusiastically narrated, to say the least, by The Real Don Steele.
Baker Street was never like this! Gene Wilder followed up his star turn in Young Frankenstein by writing, directing and starring in this well-researched period comedy featuring the great detective’s younger, envious brother, who is overmatched (to say the least) by Leo McKern’s Moriarty. Lots of hat-tips to Arthur Conan Doyle throughout for devout Holmes…
Dream logic rules the day in Leos Carax’ multi-layered film in which a mysterious shape-shifter is shepherded about Paris in a stretch limo where he assumes a different disguise at each stop. Released to enormous critical acclaim in 2012, the film stars Denis Lavant with legendary french actors Edith Scob (Eyes Without a Face) as…
John Wayne’s contemporaneous version of Shane, directed on Mexican locations by the underrated John Farrow from a Louis L’Amour novel. One of The Duke’s most archetypical performances, and in 3D yet!
John Sayles celebrates the moment the blues gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll with this affectionate musical drama set in the early fifties. The movie features a solid cast including Danny Glover, Stacy Keach, Mary Steenburgen and Gary Clark Jr. as Sonny Blake, the vagabond guitarist who shakes up the sleepy town of Harmony, Alabama.
An unlikely movie for John Schlesinger, the director of Midnight Cowboy and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Honky Tonk Freeway, with its wildly disparate cast and surreal slapstick comedy, suggests another National Lampoon movie. It didn’t help that the production itself ran amuck; one scene cost one million dollars to shoot (Schlesinger’s own Apocalypse Now). The star-spangled cast,…
Terence Fisher’s seminal vampire triumph pits Cushing against Lee in their greatest Hammer pairing and sets the pace for the next two decades of movie horror. This is the original Universal theatrical trailer, not the video reconstruction that appears on the Warner DVD.
This Spanish-British coproduction, shot in Madrid under the evocative title Panic on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, remains one of the most satisfying screen pairings of longtime friends Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Nevertheless Cushing, mourning the passing of his wife, initially tried to leave the picture before shooting and had to be talked into going through…
Fast-paced B-movie fun in the Old Dark Castle mode. Treasure hunters on a pirate island are knocked off one by one by….? A throwaway assembly line dualler, as amiable and entertaining in its way as the classically generic trailer that promotes it.
Dr Emile Franchel, then-star of LA channel 13’s “Adventures in Hypnotism” program, introduces you to “Hypno-Vista” (“You can’t resist it–it actually puts YOU in the picture!”) as crazed crime writer Michael Gough dispatches victims with inventive torture devices. AIP’s ad campaign is one of their best, even if the picture isn’t.
For some reason, this late John Ford cavalry picture has been relegated to the also-ran section, but it’s one of his most accomplished works. Plus it’s the one where Constance Towers leans her decolletage toward Wayne and Holden and purrs, “Would you like a leg or a breast?”
A pre-Network Paddy Chayefsky wrote this dark, trenchant medical satire, outrageous in its time, that now plays like a semi-documentary! George C. Scott and Diana Rigg are sensational. And beware The Paraclete of Kaborka!
First of five comic Donald E. Westlake adaptations featuring the character of Dortmunder, ex-con and master thief (sort of), played here by Robert Redford. George Segal plays Dortmunder’s brother-in-law turned partner-in-crime. Westlake, who wrote under no less than 15 pseudonyms (some of whom turned up as character names in his work), was nominated for an…
Directed by George Marshall and produced by George Pal, Houdini is a terrifically entertaining biography which has as much connection to the truth as the spiritualists that Harry Houdini himself exposed. As the celebrated escape artist, Tony Curtis performs a series of death-defying stunts in dazzling Technicolor assisted by his dazzling wife played by Janet…
Hammer’s necessarily more horrific take on the oft-filmed Conan Doyle classic features Peter Cushing and Andre Morell as one of the best Holmes/Watson pairings, despite the fact that the story keeps Holmes offscreen for a large portion of the action. Christopher Lee gets to play opposite a tarantula.
Former tabloid reporter Sam Fuller’s dynamic movies have been called crude and primitive, but at their best they play like a punch in the jaw. Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck believed in him and afforded the indie-oriented Fuller his most mainstream commercial opportunities in the 50s. This is the most exotic of the group.
Cut-rate climax to the “straight” Universal Frankenstein series gives us two Lon Chaneys for the price of one. In addition to playing the Wolf Man he’s seen here burning up again as the Monster in stock shots from Ghost of Frankenstein– inadvertently fulfilling the dropped idea of having him play both roles in Frankenstein Meets…
This is the undubbed Italian trailer for Pupi Avati’s atmospheric pseudo-giallo, set in a small Southern Italian village. Though the film was never released theatrically in the US, the advent of home video has opened up a whole new appreciation for such influential but generally unheralded genre films, only a fraction of which were seen…
Though Dan Curtis’s 1970 film is a low budget affair, it looks like Cleopatra compared to the original Dark Shadows, a beloved but chintzy soap opera that ran on ABC between 1966 and 1971. Jonathan Frid returns as the undead Barnabas Collins, and he takes full advantage of the uncensored big screen—his blood-drenched escapades recall…
In 1944, Erle C. Kenton’s creature-feature may have seemed like a cash grab or pandering to monster-loving ticket-buyers—but who cares? Take our cash! Pander! Though just 70 minutes the film contains enough plot for four movies and features a once in a lifetime cast including Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, and John Carradine. It was cowboy…