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.
Federico Fellini casts a serio-comic eye on the modern day decay of man, morals and civilization circa 1960. Stunningly photographed by Fellini’s long time collaborator, Otello Martelli, the film avoids any number of pretentious pratfalls due to the self-mocking demeanor of its world-weary leading man, Marcello Mastroianni. Nominated for four Oscars and winner of the…
The film that put Federico Fellini on the map internationally, with his wife Giuliana Masina’s‚ indelible‚ performance as the waif mistreated by brutish strongman Anthony Quinn. Richard Basehart provides further US name value although he doesn’t dub himself in the English version. Winner of the first Academy Award for foreign language film in 1956.
Nearly a lost film, music maven Lou Adler’s cheerful 1982 film about an inadvertent punk band was shot under the title All Washed Up and was shelved after a disastrous preview, only to be revived on the art house circuit in 1985. At one point there was only one surviving print, which was frequently programmed…
The spirit of Frank Tashlin hovers over Jerry Lewis’s first auteurist triumph which came at the height of his power at Paramount, allowing him to construct a huge set, add videotape (which he’d been using since The Bellboy)‚ and fill the stage with a large number of microphones a decade before Altman did the same….
A surprisingly dark and vicious entry in the middle-aged-actress horror boom of the period. What was shocking and melodramatic in 1964 still holds up today as an almost comically bleak social satire with monstrous mother Olivia deHavilland trapped in her private elevator while her world collapses around her. Banned in England for 36 years!
Robert Montgomery stars and directs himself, sort of, as detective Philip Marlowe in an ususual, “experimental” studio picture. Told entirely from Marlowe’s point of view, the subjective camera sees everything as he would see it, including fleeting glimpses of the actor himself in mirrored reflections. This was a lot harder to accomplish in 1946 than…