Set mainly in a broken down hotel in storm-swept Key Largo, Florida, John Huston’s 1948 film expands on Maxwell Anderson’s 1939 stage play and adds Bogart, Bacall and Edward G. Robinson to insure the box office. With overtones of The Petrified Forest (which also starred Bogart), Key Largo finds mobster Robinson holding a small group of people hostage under…
This 1937 boxing melodrama was eclipsed by its own 1962 remake starring Elvis Presley and suffered a humiliating title change (The Battling Bellhop) for TV distribution. Regardless, Michael Curtiz’s film, starring Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis, is sufficiently sturdy to go 12 rounds with any comer and exhibited enough moxey to earn…
Kreepy klown space aliens invade Earth and obliterate victims with kotton kandy ray guns and acid-drenched cream pies. John Vernon and Royal Dano are the only recognizable cast members. This wacko sci-fi parody and cult favorite is only movie to date written and directed by the talented Bronx-born Chiodo Brothers (Stephen, Charles and Edward), who have created memorably warped puppet and…
Universal’s made-for-TV remake of the Hemingway-inspired 1946 original was deemed too violent for telecast and was diverted to theatrical double bills. Action specialist Don Siegel turns it into a tough, economical B picture whose TV origins are obvious, but Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager (in his greatest role) make as memorable a pair of hit…
A racetrack robbery goes awry in this pivotal noir. This was Kubrick’s first real Hollywood movie, populated by a cast of iconic character actors and presented in an intricate, almost experimental non-linear style. Written by noir novelist Jim Thompson, who was held over to co-write Kubrick’s next, Paths of Glory. Famous trailer voice Art Gilmore…
Hitchcock had Jimmy Stewart, Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune and John Cassavetes had Ben Gazarra. 1976’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the second of three tempestuous collaborations between the determined director and his equally strong-willed star, is a fatalistic gangster movie with Gazzara’s beleaguered strip club entrepreneur run through an obstacle course of existential conflicts…
Perhaps the greatest of the Ealing comedies, this blackly humorous multiple murder farce is best known for Alec Guinness’s eight roles as all the D’ascoyne family victims, but it’s really murderous lead Dennis Price who walks away with the acting honors.
Ok, it’s not really such a comedy, unless you consider the comedy of embarrassment, humiliation and pain. Scorsese and DeNiro followed Raging Bull with this unexpected gem, a bracingly offbeat portrait of a wannabe comic who’ll do just about anything to impress his idol a jaded talk show host played (brilliantly) by Jerry Lewis. Audiences…
Reputedly Elvis’s own favorite performance and certainly one of his best movies, much of it shot on New Orleans’ Beale Street locations by the great Michael Curtiz. Based on a Harold Robbins novel. The current dvd version replaces the hit “Hard Headed Woman” with a previously cut stripper scene with a different song.
Original Kong animator Willis O’Brien never got credit (nor would he have wanted it) for his treatment “King Kong vs. Frankenstein,” which ultimately transmuted into the third and most popular entry in Toho’s Godzilla series. The redesigned Big G was played much more for cartoonish laughs and the series became basically kiddie-oriented. The less said…
A modern-day folk tale about the criminal ways of a close-knit gypsy clan, Frank Pierson’s 1978 film boasts a stellar cast including Eric Roberts as a Michael Corleone-like character who reluctantly takes the reins of the family “business” from his grandfather played by Sterling Haydn. Co-starring Shelly Winters and Susan Sarandon, the film was shot…
“Actually filmed in the wilds of the Dark Continent!” H. Rider Haggard’s adventure classic gets the MGM treatment with spectacular location shooting that provided years of stock footage for cheaper jungle pictures.
The spiders in director John Cardos’s 1977 eco-horror film aren’t giant-sized but there sure are a lot of them. A small town in Arizona is suddenly overrun by marauding tarantulas and the local vet, played by William Shatner, theorizes it’s because pesticides have destroyed the creepy crawlers’ natural food supply. The film has gained genuine…
Patrick McGoohan plays a radio host taken hostage in his own studio where the villains conduct a mock trial on the air. Alexis Kanner directed this uniquely plotted thriller co-starring Margaret Trudeau, then married to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Rumor has it there was a recent remake of this Best Picture Oscar-winner, but nobody seems to remember seeing it. Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge also won deserved Oscars, but John Ireland, in his best role ever, didn’t. Neville Brand played the lead in a two-part 1958 Kraft Theater TV version directed by Sidney Lumet.
Producer Victor Saville made movies out of three hardboiled Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane, but this is the only one, thanks to director Robert Aldrich, that transcended its potboiler origins. Spillane hated it, and told screenwriter A.I. Bezerrides so. Ralph Meeker plays Hammer as a nihilistic, blackmailing sadist–and he’s the hero. Cold war atomic…
Based on Kommisar X, a popular series of crime novels from Germany, 1965’s Kiss Kiss… Kill Kill is the first of seven lightly satirical adventures starring a suave pair of crime-busting spies played by Tony Kendall and Brad Harris. Kiss Kiss is notable for its proto-Our Man Flint plot featuring a criminal mastermind, his private island…
George Sidney’s terrific film adaptation of the popular Broadway musical (derived from Taming of the Shrew) underwent a lot of cleaning up from the Hays Office, which removed numerous suggestive lyrics and risque jokes. Even so, it’s considered one of the most entertaining of the vaunted MGM musicals and still enchants today. Although the cleverly…
Billy Wilder took a lotta brickbats for this “vulgar”, “tasteless” and “crude” sex comedy set in Climax, Nevada, which was roundly condemned from pulpits and lecterns countrywide in 1964. Its sleazy reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated over the years as pop culture has raced to embrace such concepts as DNA hair gel and carnal relations…
Being photographed in black and white doesn’t deter Ann-Margret, even in monochrome the fiery redhead is a dazzling distraction. And when this kitten gets her claws in the blandly handsome politico played by John Forsythe, it’s a match made in pulp heaven. Director Douglas Heyes’s sexed-up JD film has a well-deserved reputation for being over…
From the bygone days (1971) when studios routinely made the kind of adult material now found mainly in indies and on cable television. Jane Fonda pulled down a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal of the call girl without a heart of gold who gets wrapped up in a murder investigation. Brilliantly shot by Gordon Willis.
Philadelphia-born Director Richard Lester sandwiched this wacky paeon to Swinging ’60s London between “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”. Based on Ann Jellicoe’s play and notable as the fleeting screen debuts of Jacqueline Bissett, Jane Birkin and Charlotte Rampling.
A most atypical George Romero picture about a troupe of traveling motorcycle jousters which pretty much fell through the cracks in theatrical release. Naturalistic, epic-length and altogether unexpected, with nary a vampire or zombie in sight.
The venerable Mirror Crack’d format gets a workout in Dave DeCoteau’s self-described “bitchy and raunchy” mystery comedy, in which three rival actresses who hate each other reunite for a horror movie sequel only to find their crew is being killed off by a mysterious figure who duplicates the murders in the script.
Jack Rabin and Irving Block were a couple of indie FX mavens whose works ranged from Night of the Hunter to Robot Monster. But one of their most offbeat creations was the giant alien robot Kronos, who wanted not Our Women but Our Energy. On its own terms it’s a pretty nifty little picture, with…
Masaki Kobayashi’s 1965 anthology of spooky Japanese folk tales could be considered the Nipponese answer to Ealing’s Dead of Night. Shot in scope with a ravishing color scheme, the movie is more lyrical than frightening though the third segment, Hoichi the Earless, manages to be both nerve wracking and sardonically funny.