Moviegoers who loved Philip Roth’s comic masterpiece about the bedeviled Alexander Portnoy, his monstrous mother, and his mostly silent psychiatrist, were hard-pressed to endure Ernest Lehman’s awkward adaptation starring Richard Benjamin, Karen Black (as “The Monkey”), and Lee Grant as Sophie Portnoy, the nagging nightmare at the root of Portnoy’s (many) complaints. Critical reaction was brutal…
Obsessive producer David O. Selznick fussed over this metaphysical celebration of wife Jennifer Jones for years before finally releasing it in 1948 to dismal box office returns. One of the most haunting love stories ever to come from Hollywood, it improves on the poetic Robert Nathan novella it’s based on. Beautifully shot and scored, it…
Isabelle Adjani’s award-winning performance anchors this most unusual and little-seen marital nightmare from Polish director Andrzej Zulawksi, which won plaudits in Europe in its 123 minute version but played off as a horror programmer in America after losing 26 minutes. Imagine Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage set in Berlin with special effects by Carlo Rambaldi….
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 examine what our landscape might look like had something in the past gone terribly wrong. The backstory behind 1998’s Six-String Samurai is a Russian nuclear victory over the U.S. in…
A film influenced as much by South Park as Mad Magazine, Uwe Boll’s gonzo satire was based on a video game first released in 1997. Starring Zack Ward and Dave Foley as two small-town con artists involved in a get-rich-quick scheme, the film evolves (or devolves) into an apocalyptic confrontation between a video game entrepreneur and…
Carrie Fisher’s witty 1987 roman-a-clef about her Hollywood upbringing is brought to the screen in somewhat restructured form by director Mike Nichols in one of his most underrated works. Nichols stages the story of a troubled actress and her diva mother with impeccable comic timing and understated emotion. Fisher’s mom Debbie Reynolds was ready to…
Subtitled Night of the Chicken Dead, this gross “fromage to Takashi Miike” continues the tradition of Troma-tizing other movies, this time under the guise of a fast-food horror musical. “Humans: the other white meat… Unless you’re black, then it’s dark meat…”, etc.
Scream Queen Martine Beswick wears another kind of crown in Michael Carreras’s loopy jungle thriller about a tribe of prehistoric playmates and their love-starved leader. Beswick plays the evil Queen Kari who sets her sights on an unlucky explorer played by Michael Latimer. Released in the UK as Slave Girls, the movie was cut by 17…
Roger Corman explains why Ray Milland is filling Vincent Price’s shoes in his third Edgar Allan Poe adaptation. As the tortured 19th century nobleman terrified that his catalepsy will lead to being buried alive, the morose Milland combines with the grim storyline to position this as Corman’s most morbid Poe film, unleavened by any glimmer of…
One of most charming and clever political satires of the ’60s almost didn’t make it to the screen intact. Director Theodore J. Flicker’s background in improv comedy provides cohesion to a wild scenario that pissed off everybody from the CIA to the FBI. James Coburn spoofs his Our Man Flint image as a paranoid psychiatrist…
One of the great newspaper movies. Even though today we know the identity of “Deep Throat”, Alan Pakula and William Goldman’s tense reconstruction of Woodward & Bernstein’s Watergate investigation still grips and surprises. Impeccably cast. Another movie that lost the Best Picture Oscar to… Rocky.
Reeling from his divorce from Jane Fonda, French director Roger Vadim made his first American movie for MGM. Unlikely as it seems today, the scuttlebutt at the time was that Rock Hudson’s love scenes with the numerous high school nymphets went All The Way! The buzz helped turn this gently smutty black-comic mystery into a…
A ravishing Tuesday Weld is the sexy psychopath whose nihilistic behavior shocks even mentally disturbed Tony Perkins in this instant cult classic which has been simmering below the radar for 30 years. B-movie queen Beverly Garland has one of her best roles as Tuesday’s doomed mother.
Garry Marshall’s romantic fantasy is a throwback to naughty pre-code comedies of the thirties and one of the most successful films of the nineties. Richard Gere is perfectly cast as a calculating wheeler-dealer who falls in love with an “escort” but it’s Julia Roberts as the object of his desire that made the movie a…
Director Michael Ritchie’s lurid crime tale finds hot buttons to push you didn’t know existed. Lee Marvin plays a mobster trying to collect a debt from meatpacking boss Gene Hackman who runs a human trafficking ring populated by female virgins who, while awaiting the auction block, bide their time in cattle pens (naked, no less)….
Following a series of high-budget studio assignments, writer-director John Carpenter retreated to his indie roots with this scaled-down tribute to British sci-fi legend Nigel Kneale — Carpenter’s screenplay is even credited to “Martin Quatermass.” Priest Donald Pleasence discovers an ancient canister full of liquid Evil which “broadcasts” warnings from the future. Or something. Given total…
Billy Wilder’s elegant take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring sleuth never reached theaters in its intended 3-hour Roadshow form, but still ranks as one of the most memorable Holmes outings. It’s fairly obscure these days, but perhaps the box office success of the recent Robert Downey Jr. series will lead viewers back to sample the…
Too Out There for producer MGM, which released it through a subsidiary company, this wild and wooly multiple-murder perversity is director Paul Bartel’s most fully realized movie, a zonked-out psychosexual thriller beautifully shot by future director Andrew Davis. Lucille Benson is a memorable Aunt Martha in one of the great cult movies.
Corey Allen and Warren Oates play two drifters engaged in a cat and mouse game with a couple whose marriage is already on the rocks. Leslie Stevens’ film was budgeted at $60,000 (he used his own house for the set) yet the director was able to secure Oscar-winning cinematographers Ted McCord (The Treasure of the…
Anticipating punk rock, Peter Watkins’ semi-documentary study of a future society using music to enslave the masses appropriates some unauthorized reenactments from the National Film Board of Canada’s groundbreaking Paul Anka docu “Lonely Boy”. How Universal ended up distributing this is a mystery even they couldn’t solve.
Our friend, the late Jonathan Kaplan, was the nephew of Van Heflin, who stars in this unique noir. The American Dream gets drop kicked in Joseph Losey’s existential thriller about a psycho cop’s obsession with a lonely housewife whose hubby he plots to kill. The Sisyphean ending takes place in‚ the ghost town of Calico,…
Dick Clark produced Richard Rush’s ode to the Haight-Ashbury scene, filmed on location by Laszlo Kovacs in Psychedelic Color. Remember, as Dean Stockwell tells us, “all the games gotta go, or else it’s just a plastic hassle”!
A most unusual trailer (almost a short subject at nearly 7 minutes long) from 1960, when Hitchcock had merchandised himself a la Walt Disney into one of the most recognizable movie directors on earth. WARNING! MR. LANDIS REQUESTS YOU WATCH THIS TRAILER FIRST WITHOUT HIS VOICEOVER TO ENJOY MR. HITCHCOCK’S NARRATION.
The only way to watch Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho with a fresh eye is to never have seen Hitchcock’s irreplaceable original. That’s because Van Sant’s film is virtually an identical cousin of that 1960 classic using many of the same camera set-ups, albeit this time in color. Whether seen as a provocative post-modern…
After the boxoffice failure of PSYCHO III plans for Anthony Perkins to again direct and star in a follow up were derailed and Mick Garris was brought in to direct. Original PSYCHO scribe Joseph Stefano decided to ignore the plot twists of the previous two entries and the unsold tv pilot BATES MOTEL and treat…
With his 1984 film debut, the multi-talented Minnesotan proved that all you really need to carry a movie are some killer dance moves and a dyn-o-mite set list guaranteed to rock the house for 111 minutes. Purple Rain is directed by Albert Magnoli in the most prosaic fashion possible but at least he stays out of the way of the musical performers,…