Another great Cary Grant performance was overshadowed somewhat by the Oscar win of co-star James Stewart, which was widely viewed as a consolation prize for his losing the award for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Grant and Katharine Hepburn had previously teamed in author Philip Barry and director George Cukor’s earlier Holiday, a sort of…
FBI director J Edgar Hoover personally told director Sam Fuller how much he hated his films, especially this one, in which pickpocket Richard Widmark exhibits no particular patriotism while dealing with vicious Communist spies. Nevertheless his brutal noir classic has survived to become one of the director’s most revered films. Fox contractee Thelma Ritter was…
Red herrings abound in this infamous video nasty helmed by Spanish director J. Piquer Simon and starring Christopher George, Lynda Day and star-crossed fugitive from Hollywood, Edmund Purdom. The Tales from the Crypt-like story involves a psychotic killer reconstructing his mother’s body with the spare parts of his victims.
Timothy Spall stars in a fascinating character study about a compassionate executioner. Based on the true story of Albert Pierrepoint who presided over 400 hangings in England between 1932 and 1956 (including the Nazis tried at Nuremberg), Pierrepoint was considered England’s most prolific hangman as well as its most humane (taking care to finish the…
John Dexter directed this story about at a disaffected young cabbie, an older but no wiser incarnation of The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock. Singer-actor Jordon Christopher plays Jonathan, the misanthrope who bullies his fares and any pigeons that get under foot. Jill O’Hara plays his sometime girlfriend and the terrific supporting cast includes William Redfield and…
This forgotten grindhouse concoction pits a flamboyantly gay biker gang against the straights. Further proof, as if any was needed, that the world of ’70s cinema was light-years from our own. Priscilla Queen of the Desert it’s not!
A movie likely to provoke as much controversy (and occasional retching) today as it did in 1972, Pink Flamingos is, in its own way, a seminal independent film; made in a Baltimore suburb for $10,000 by a 26 year-old John Waters and starring a home grown band of outsiders (featuring the alarming 370 lb. drag…
Director Alan Parker turns Pink Floyd’s The Wall into a feature length music video in this 1992 adaptation. Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof plays a navel-gazing rock star “walled up” inside a motel room and Bob Hoskins pops up as his manager. Even with such a downer narrative, the film garnered positive reviews and gave E.T….
A chameleon by nature, Peter Sellers had been turning in inspired comic performances since the early fifties – but it took the role of the habitually hapless Inspector Clouseau (originally intended for Peter Ustinov) in this first of seven The Pink Panther comedies to catapult him to superstar status. Though director Blake Edwards’ screenplay placed the…
Roger Corman’s 1978 Jaws ripoff spawned remakes in 1995 (for cable) and 2010 (in 3-D) and its own “3-DD” sequel, as well as an Italian-made 1981 flying fish sequel directed by James Cameron. Although released three years after Spielberg’s blockbuster, Piranha hit the international jackpot especially in South America. Part ’50s sci-fi spoof and part underwater gore fest, this vaguely subversive Joe Dante-John Sayles collaboration…
With a great subject and a wonderful cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Kenneth Branagh, Richard Curtis’s 2009 comedy-drama should have a bigger following. Its release was complicated by studio cuts and a title change which, for once, seems to have helped the film find its audience. Hoffman is a rebellious DJ broadcasting from an…
Probably the best known of the AIP Corman/Poe series, circa 1961. Writer Richard Matheson had to concoct an almost entirely new story incorporating Poe’s central situation. The great Paul Frees narrates the trailer.
Jack Hill gives us the lowdown on one of his most belatedly popular movies, which took several years to make it to the drive-ins, largely because it was shot in black-and-white. Filmed under the title The Winner, it’s a gritty, no-frills drag racing saga set around the dangerous Figure Eight Races, which seem designed to…
Director David Twohy’s modestly budgeted science-fiction thriller was a surprise hit in 2000. Starring Vin Deisel as the space-age anti-hero Richard Riddick, the film grossed over 53 million leading to a 2004 sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick. Twohy (screenwriter for 1998’s The Fugitive and TFH guru Mick Garris’ Critters 2) revisited the character three more times in…
Plan 9 From Outer Space is the prototypical Ed Wood movie, a low rent but mightily ambitious mix of old-fashioned horror and new-fangled science fiction (the original title was Grave Robbers from Outer Space). Adding to the fun are some of Ed’s favorite eccentrics including Vampira, Tor Johnson, and perhaps the oddest oddball of all,…
One of the major science fiction pictures of its era. J. Lee Thompson was originally to direct, but was busy with McKenna’s Gold. Franklin Schaffner was recommended to replace him by star Charlton Heston. Author Pierre Boulle objected to the famous ending provided by Rod Serling (rewritten by Michael Wilson), but later came to accept…
Gothic grandmaster Mario Bava leaves his corpse-strewn crypts behind and takes off into deep (and scary) outer space. In doing so he simply transforms the spaceships into intergalactic haunted houses (though sans cobwebs). Britain’s Monthly Film Bulletin accurately pegged this lurid Italian-Spanish-US mash-up as “a triumph of mind over matter, or of Bava over a…
Clint Eastwood’s taut directorial debut prefigures Fatal Attraction in its obsessed stalker plotline, and has risen to the upper echelons of the psycho-girlfriend thriller genre. Attractively shot in Carmel, CA, where Eastwood was later elected mayor.
The great comedian/director Jacques Tati’s 1967 comedy, focusing on events taking place during a single day and set in an enormous phantasmagorical movie set, recalls both Ulysses and Jerry Lewis’s The Ladies’ Man. Tati also pays homage to animator Tex Avery’s cautionary cartoon The House Of Tomorrow when he finds himself in an exhibit touting technological…
John Boorman’s dreamily stylized adaptation of a Donald E. Westlake novel was way ahead of its time, adapting New Wave techniques to produce a deliberately alienating effect that confused and annoyed the brass at MGM, and might even be a moment-of-death flashback. Lee Marvin’s greatest role. Remade more conventionally as Payback in 1999.
Kathryn Bigelow’s first commercial hit is a visceral surfing/heist thriller that takes its title from the moment when a wave breaks as it hits a point of land jutting out from the coastline. Under such earlier titles as Johnny Utah and Riders on the Storm this was originally conceived to star Matthew Broderick and Charlie…
“What Ivy wants, Ivy gets.” Depraved teen seductress Drew Barrymore is the houseguest from hell in TFH Guru Katt Shea’s erotic psycho thriller, which didn’t pack them in on its limited theatrical release but became a big enough hit on cable and home video to spawn three exploitation-minded sequels. Blink and you’ll miss a young…
Peering into the past through the rosiest of glasses, Pollyanna is the dream child of two dedicated nostalgists, Walt Disney and writer/director David Swift. Considering the sentimental story line—a young orphan charms a morose midwestern town with her “glad game”—the film is even-tempered and never bathetic, thanks mainly to 13-year old Hayley Mills, a natural…
“They’re he-eere!” Director Tobe Hooper’s fifth feature was his biggest to date, produced on a grand scale by co-writer Steven Spielberg the same year he made ET. Its critical and box office success was undercut by persistent rumors that Spielberg had co-opted the film much like Howard Hawks did with Christian Nyby (on The Thing)…
Even in 1976 Joe Ruben’s drive-in sexploitation hit was considered a cut above the usual, so its relative obscurity today can only be ascribed to its long unavailablity.
Who knew good-natured Portland, Oregon could be so hard-boiled? It certainly looks that way in Harold Schuster’s 1957 noir with Edward Binns as a barkeep caught between two hungry mob bosses. Carolyn Craig, the world-class screamer from House on Haunted Hill, plays Binns’ wife and she’s got plenty to scream about when threatened by some…