A small town in New Mexico is decimated by an alien organism in Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain, based on the first book by Michael Crichton (Westworld, Jurassic Park) to be brought to the screen. Though Wise’s film was advertised as a wall-to-wall nail-biter (“The suspense will last a lifetime!”) the movie is largely inert with a…
“C’mon out, Rocky. You haven’t got a chance!” 70 years of parodies haven’t dimmed the luster of this much-beloved Warners gangster saga that pretty much defined the crime movie as we knew it for a generation. Followed by a sequel, Angels Wash Their Faces, and countless programmers featuring the Dead End Kids as The East…
Any movie with a giant amoeba in it is OK with us. Astronauts lay waste to the flora and fauna of Mars and suffer the consequences. Legions of kids grew up with this low-budget favorite on TV Creature Feature programs.
A painting has gone missing at the home of wealthy socialite Mrs. Rittenhouse and there’s only one man to find it; Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding. All four Marx Brothers (including Zeppo) are on board for this hilarious farce but it’s Groucho as the outrageous Spaulding who shoulders the most memorable moments including the introduction of…
Director John Landis’ raucous satire of early sixties college life was a real game-changer when it was released in 1978, creating the template for a decade’s worth of politically incorrect comedies to come. The movie’s not-so-secret weapon was the film debut of Saturday Night Live star John Belushi as prototypical slob, John “Bluto” Blutarsky. In a bit of…
Woody Allen’s breakthrough film is a finely observed romance, a surreal time-traveling autobiography and a stand-up comedy confessional. With the help of cinematographer Gordon Willis and editor Ralph Rosenblum, Allen juggles those disparate elements with the skill of a Houdini. The late Diane Keaton’s exquisitely flakey and funny performance was rewarded by the Academy who named her the…
Bette Davis must have enjoyed making The Nanny, as she returned for a second Hammer Films project, this one a black comedy written by studio workhorse Jimmy Sangster. She’s another monstrous mom who torments her dysfunctional brood. We at TFH like this one a lot more than David DeCoteau does.
Doppelgängers get the science fiction treatment in Mike Cahill’s otherworldly drama from 2011. Brit Marling plays a brilliant young astronomer whose studies are sidetracked by tragedy. The appearance of another planet, a duplicate of earth and its habitants, may be the key to her redemption.
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 find wine pairings for three films which borrow heavily from the Laurel and Hardy archives (fiddle with tie, do slowburn to double take.) Two are salutations from different eras, while…
Bob Einstein’s political satire brings together several unlikely duos, Laurel and Hardy, Nixon and Agnew, and Tom Smothers and Jonathan Haze. Smothers and Haze (star of The Little Shop of Horrors) produced this obscure film in 1972—obscure because an unhappy Smothers promptly buried it. Nixon and Agnew are portrayed as hapless clowns in the style…
Roger Corman tells us the story behind his second ten-day western, a pro-Native American melodrama in the Broken Arrow mold. Dick Miller, originally hired to play a Native American, was called upon to fill in several other roles as well, all of whom bite the dust. At one point he actually shoots himself!
One of the great romantic movies and one of Billy Wilder’s biggest hits. Fred MacMurray, who was genuinely startled by Jack Lemmon’s improvs with his nose spray, stepped into his role on two weeks’ notice after first choice Paul Douglas died suddenly. The Lemmon-Shirley MacLaine gin game was added because MacLaine was constantly playing cards…
Action cinema, that most kinetic of genres, arguably reached its absolute U.S. cultural apex in the 1990s. While muscle-bound strongmen in the ’80s vein (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, and even Chuck Norris — though Norris’ impact was declining) continued to pack a box office punch into the succeeding decade, a…
One of the most troubled productions ever, and one of the most acclaimed. Although he considered shooting in Australia, Francis Coppola decided on the Philippines because production coordinator Fred Roos had contacts there from shooting two back-to-back Monte Hellman films. Some of the eventually $30 million budget went into the pockets of Ferdinand Marcos’s local…
Ed Harris directed and starred in this 2008 throwback to cowboy movies of yore, in particular 1959’s Warlock. Harris and Viggo Mortensen are the marshall and deputy of small town Appaloosa, New Mexico going toe to toe with a ruthless rancher played by Jeremy Irons. In another nod to time-honored Western tropes, Renée Zellweger plays…
Still playing midnight shows at theaters across the country after 35 years, this astounding futuristic relic from those wacky guys at Cannon Films has become one of the most popular, even beloved stinkaroos of all time, the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. There really are no words, but Josh Olson gives it a shot anyway.
Top notch action director William Witney brings together Audie Murphy and a vivid supporting cast of B-movie stars including Buster Crabbe and Gloria Talbott. Murphy plays a former Quantrill’s Raider seeking redemption in his search for the kidnapped daughter of a Yaqui Indian chief. Thanks to an empathetic script, Native Americans are treated with all…
Jean-Pierre Melville’s film is a harrowing look at life in the French resistance during World War II. Starring legendary actors Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, and Jean-Pierre Cassel, the film was a political football during its initial release in 1969, but has been reappraised and, more importantly, restored for safekeeping.
The fourth feature from writer-director-producer James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, I’ll Do Anything) focuses on a dysfunctional, obsessive-compulsive novelist in Greenwich Village (Jack Nicholson), the gay painter who lives next door (Greg Kinnear), and a waitress and single parent (Helen Hunt) who breaks through his crusty shell. Funny and painful, with top…
The King of Noirs. John Huston’s powerful adaptation of W.R. Burnett’s heist novel benefits from top-notch performances by a perfectly cast ensemble and Ben Maddow’s terrific adaptation. You can bet Kubrick saw this several times before making The Killing.
John Carpenter’s low, low budget ($100,000) thriller about a gun-happy attack on a police station was inspired in equal parts by Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. After a lackluster stateside release the film gained traction in Europe and its cult status was set in stone by the early eighties (thanks in no…
Another terrific cast in one of the best of the Amicus multi-story horrors, set in a madhouse. Reissued as “House of Crazies”.
After hitting pay dirt with The Land That Time Forgot, Britain’s Amicus Productions returned to Edgar Rice Burroughs for another lost world adventure, this time inspired by his public domain hollow-earth Pellucidar novels. Victorian scientist Peter Cushing’s ornate drilling machine penetrates the center of the earth and lands Doug McClure and himself in a prehistoric…
Expense was clearly spared in every department of George Pal’s mystifyingly cheesy follow up to his 1960 hit The Time Machine. Pal had wanted to film Gerald Hargreaves’ fantasy play for years, but MGM only greenlit the project because of the international success of the Italian Hercules movies, and insisted on keeping the budget down….
A nuclear age title suitable for a Mamie Van Doren movie, Atomic Blonde stars Charlize Theron as Lorraine Broughton, a CIA agent with killer looks and a lethal left hook. Powered by an eclectic cast featuring James McAvoy and John Goodman, director David Leitch’s critically acclaimed thriller was based on Antony Johnston and Sam Hart’s…
The title is risible but Roger Corman’s landlocked monster movie boasts more than a few genuinely eerie moments, particularly when the titular creatures begin to communicate using the voices of the people they’ve murdered. Corman favorite Mel Welles is one of the unfortunates who gets up close and personal with the irradiated crustaceans, meanwhile the…