A confirmed bachelor gets drunk one night and wakes up married to Virna Lisi. Obviously an American tragedy. Richard Quine’s improbable comedy was also a box office hit, mainly because of its star-power; Jack Lemmon plays the wealthy cartoonist (!) who feels trapped by his good fortune and begins to fantasize about murder—his one mistake…

1981 turned out to be the Year of the Werewolf, enticing horror fans with An American Werewolf In London, Full Moon High, Wolfen, and the first out of the gate, Joe Dante’s film buff-oriented mixture of lupine chills and hip chuckles. An unexpected hit, it spawned six sequels and a semi-remake: The Howling Reborn (2011).

Fritz Lang’s fraught melodrama about love, lust and murder packs a special punch thanks to the volatile presence of Broderick Crawford as a jealous railroader and Gloria Grahame as his two-timing wife. Glenn Ford plays the poor army vet caught in their web.

“What you call dirty words, I call ghetto expression”, said in-your-face underground standup comic and R&B singer Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away 12 years ago at 81. This is the sequel to his first vehicle, Dolemite, which he based on a trash-talking wino who frequented a Los Angeles record shop Moore managed. Although his mainstream…

Something fishy for sure! Human/salmon hybrid aquatic monsters are on the loose, menacing unclad buxom girls in a Pacific Northwest fishing community (most of whom were paid scale, get it?). New World Pictures’ popular follow up to Piranha was gorier and scuzzier and elevated 20 year-old Rob Bottin to the post of chief monster maker….

Director Paul Lynch followed his hit Prom Night with this teens-vs.-slasher item, poorly received in its day but now undergoing a sort of rehabilitation. One of the last of the Canadian horror pickups released in the early 80s by Avco Embassy in their bid to compete with New World. Soon after, the studio was sold…

Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida are the only English-speaking actors in Jean Dellanoy’s turgid 1956 French version of the Victor Hugo classic. An elaborate production which failed to catch on with audiences or critics, although it’s one of the most faithful adaptations.

This gritty, downbeat adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel was director Robert Rossen’s favorite of his films, and one of Paul Newman’s as well. He reprised his role as pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 The Color of Money and won the Oscar that eluded him here. Pool pro Willie Moscone coached…

This low budget graveyard chiller was producer-director Albert Band’s second outing and remains one of his most accomplished in a prolific career that fostered many films by his sons, producer Charles and composer Richard. Morbid, paranoid and imaginatively directed, it found a small audience on tv over the years but hasn’t exactly penetrated the zeitgeist.

Compromised from the outset by the studio (they even replaced his leading lady Anita Bjork with Anne Baxter), this has never been considered one of Hitchcock’s most effective films. However, Hitchcockian themes of Catholic guilt and his moody use of the Quebec locations still make it required viewing for his fans and it’s full of…

One of the classic gimmick trailers, entirely staged with only a few short glimpses of the combo program it’s pitching (The Blood Spattered Bride and a retitled reissue of Poor Albert and Little Annie). They don’t make trailers like this anymore, more’s the pity.

Women exchanged knowing looks when they stood in line for this sci-fi classic about a nervous bride and her otherworldly groom; the movie’s droll title was part of the fun, even though both Tom Tryon and Gloria Talbott play their roles with utmost seriousness. Gene Fowler Jr.’s genuinely eerie take on the war between the…

Director David Greene courted his share of controversy with this 1970 mystery about a 14 year-old who develops a crush on a serial killer. The film stars Jenny Agutter as the wayward child and Bryan Marshall as the possibly murderous object of her affections.

Hoping to horn in on Universal’s wartime horror windfall, RKO saddled Val Lewton with titles like this one, but the producer, incapable of making dumb movies, turned it into one of his greatest achievements. Dark, moody, poetic and altogether memorable despite its meager budget.

I WANT YOUR BLOOD Pairing wine with movies!  See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies and many more at Trailers From Hell.  It seems we are still safer at home. As we do every so often with the Trailers From Hell gang, we take a look at vampires.  It’s right that…

“Speak! You have a civil tongue in your head. I know, because I sewed it back myself!” says Prof. Frankenstein, played by popular character actor Whit Bissell in one of his rare leading roles. This hurried followup to AIP’s sleeper hit I Was a Teenage Werewolf hardly scales the same low budget heights but it’s…

In 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Whit Bissell plays a mad psychiatrist who transforms Michael Landon into a blood-thirsty lycanthrope. It was Landon’s first starring role and the first picture for director Gene Fowler Jr. It was also the first in a series of Herman Cohen productions in which predatory adults lure troubled teens…

J. Lee Thompson’s taut 1958 war-thriller stars John Mills and Anthony Quayle as two soldiers engaged in a nerve-wracking trek across the North African desert. A bracing mix of suspense and sharply-drawn characterization, the film was well received in the UK but was not so lucky in its stateside release where it was given the…

Directed by John Sturges, an expert at action-powered epics, Ice Station Zebra is one of the last of the deluxe “roadshow” movies (it even comes with an overture and intermission). It was too square for late sixties audiences but seen now it plays like a relic from the fifties, as comfortable as an old shoe and…

Lindsay Anderson’s savage satire about a gun-happy insurrection at one of Britain’s public schools plays out like a blood-drenched version of Zero for Conduct. Malcolm McDowell stars as Mick Travis, a persecuted student who turns his violent revenge fantasies into fact. McDowell’s character returned in the far more sweet-tempered (but no less surreal) O Lucky…

The pairing of Orson Welles and Oliver Reed raised eyebrows but Michael Winner’s scathing satire of the advertising world paid off with its cheeky attitude and a go-for-broke performance by Reed. The supporting cast is a British film fan’s dream; Carol White, Michael Hordern, and a typically luminous Marianne Faithfull.

Joe Dante takes an alternately nostalgic and clear-eyed look at boyhood life in Key West circa 1962 where the busy military base is a daily reminder of nuclear era nerves and the movie theater is the only escape. A bigger-than-life John Goodman plays a free-wheeling director who brings his latest fright film to town in…

Fannie Hurst’s four-hankie bestseller had been filmed before in 1934, but Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake, his last Hollywood film, is the one to remember. Derided at the time by critics and audiences, it has come to sum up Sirk’s serial attack on the hypocritical institutions of family and motherhood as practiced in ’50s America.

A movie about movie trailers? Count us in. More specifically, director/writer Lake Bell’s 2013 farce is about the cutthroat world of movie trailer narrators. Potentially a thin premise, the talented Lake Bell, who also stars, spins some comedy gold with the help of a terrific cast of comedian/actors including Demetri Martin and Rob Corddry. The…

Extensively researched with the help of childhood chum Harper Lee, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was a true-life horror story written in a poet’s voice. There’s poetry in Richard Brooks’s 1967 movie adaptation as well, thanks to cinematographer Conrad Hall who contributes some of the finest black and white imagery in movie history. Robert Blake…

Subtitled Gimme that Prime Time Religion, this was Marty Feldman’s reward for the box office success of his previous directorial effort. Finally free of studio interference, he chose to make a trenchant satire of televangelists and religion, only to see it savaged critically and his five-picture studio deal terminated. Seldom revived or televised, it’s a…