Director James Goldstone’s 1971 film takes its title from an ancient mariner’s rhyme, “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning” – the movie is no less compelling than that ominous rhyme, the story of a teen uprooted to a lonely town in New Mexico at the beginning of World War II. Richard Thomas plays the…
There are more twists and turns in two minutes of David Mamet’s action-packed drama than a dozen martial arts films (Chuck Norris need not apply). With an eclectic cast featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tim Allen, Ricky Jay, and Mamet favorite Joe Mantegna, the head-spinning plot mixes up insurance lawyers, magicians, crooked fight promoters, and jiu-jitsu in…
Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift both wanted to play the lead in John Huston’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ Southern Gothic novel. But after Clift’s death Huston chose Brando to play the US army major whose obsession with serviceman Robert Forster leads to disaster. Brian Keith is especially good in support. Imagine this being made by…
Stooges and Bowery Boys director Edward Bernds brings his budget-savvy aesthetic to one of AIP’s profitable drive-in delinquency teen exploitation pics (great poster, btw). Bernds was accidentally nominated for an Oscar a year earlier, when the Academy confused his Bowery Boys vehicle High Society with the Bing Crosby-Grace Kelly musical. TFH Guru Jonathan Kaplan remade…
Director Alex Cox’s grungy sci-fi comedy has something for everybody; possessed life forms, shaggy dog humor, Harry Dean Stanton and one of the greatest punk rock soundtracks in the history of movies. Iggy Pop’s theme song kicks off the quirky plot about a layabout (Emilio Estevez) who finds his calling repossessing cars and ends up…
Roman Polanski’s first English-language film is one of his best, a a brilliant study of a young French girl’s descent into madness. Catherine Deneuve’s most iconic performance, with one of the great closing shots ever.
Darren Aronofsky’s hyperventilating portrait of drug addiction focuses on a group of Coney Island inhabitants each with their own down-spiraling horror story. Relentlessly grim, the film is shot and edited in a speedfreak frenzy with Clint Mansell’s slash and burn musical score egging on each character’s fast track to hell. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for an Oscar for…
Directed by Daniel Petrie and written by Lewis John Carlino, Resurrection is an unusually thoughtful film about the possibilities of healing sick or injured people through compassion alone. Ellen Burstyn is the Kansas housewife who has an out of body experience after a car crash that gives her extraordinary powers, Sam Shepard is the boyfriend who…
Jack Arnold is once again in the director’s chair and Ricou Browning is back in his Gill Man suit but the Creature clocks in with a new crew in tow, including John Agar as an animal psychologist and Lori Nelson as a beautiful ichthyologist and inevitable object of the creature’s affections. The film was the…
Regrettably, we haven’t paid much attention here at TFH to the flood of Euro sword-and-sandal coproductions that followed the international success of the Steve Reeves Hercules films. Brian Trenchard-Smith remedies this oversight with his analysis of one of the most typical examples of the peplum genre that clogged cinemas throughout the early 60s.
The composer George Gershwin died in 1937 and eight years later Hollywood paid tribute with this biography directed by Irving Rapper. The preponderance of musicians appearing as themselves, including Paul Whiteman and Oscar Levant, confirms the storyline will concentrate on Gershwin’s music while playing fast and loose with the details of his private life. Robert…
Richard Pryor prowls the stage of the Hollywood Paladium for 82 remarkable minutes in this 1982 “concert” film, gleefully riffing on the roller-coaster turns of his tumultuous personal life (including his cocaine addiction and self-immolation) while effortlessly embodying a multitude of characters, in particular his guilt-tripping friend Jim Brown and the grizzeled sidewalk philosopher, “Mudbone”….
Director Sam Peckinpah was furious when the studio cavalierly pulled the plug on his Colorado location shoot, forcing him to build a mining town full of fake snow in Bronson Canyon. Nevertheless he was able to regroup and the resulting movie, an elegiac valedictory‚ for western icons Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, set the tone…
James Coburn made his film debut as a naive gunslinger in one the finest of Budd Boetticher’s laconic series of sparsely stylish low-budget Randolph Scott Westerns, shot mostly in and around Lone Pine, California. Burt Kennedy’s ironic script has Scott playing another vengeful loner, this time a bounty hunter trying to take Lee Van Cleef’s…
By the time he directed this dark thriller Mick Garris had become a Stephen King specialist. King’s pioneering work was the world’s first mass-market electronic book, sold for downloading at $2.50. 400,000 copies were downloaded during the first 24 hours. Even so, this film version received only a token theatrical release.
Blacklisted in the states, Jules Dassin directed this prototypical crime film in France with a meager budget and no bankable stars—he got the last laugh, winning Best Director at Cannes. He may have been too efficient, the film was banned in some countries because crooks were using the brilliant heist scene as a blueprint. Dassin…
Howard Hawks’ riposte to the likes of High Noon and 3:10 to Yuma is one of the great Movie Star Westerns, cannily targeted at every demographic available.
An intelligent, well-acted “message” melodrama hides behind that hard-nosed title. Directed by Don Siegel at his most primal, the film’s violence erupts in compelling contrast to the quiet intelligence of the screenplay by Richard Collins (My Gun is Quick). Its empathetic attitude is due in some part to veteran producer Walter Wanger whose recent stint in…
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 remember three movies which featured Ned Beatty, who passed away recently. One of the most successful films of 1972 was Deliverance, directed by John Boorman. Ned Beatty played one of…
Dismissed in some circles as a poor man’s Deliverance, the reputation of this Canadian survivalist slasher movie has risen over the years. The original US release was a bowdlerized 89 minute cutdown but the stronger 100 minute original is now available on DVD. Also released under the title The Creeper.
Third in the series of seven self-aware Hope-Crosby Road comedies, this Ishtar-like entry was one of the most popular. Full of Hollywood in-jokes and asides to the audience (much like Warner Bros cartoons), the Road pictures transcend their dated settings with a modernistic approach that has stood the test of time. Famous for an unplanned…
A grim psychological thriller starring Mimsy Farmer, Robert Walker and Rita Hayworth, 1970’s Road to Salina was directed by Georges Lautner, a man best known for his lighthearted comedies. Walker plays a drifter who may or may not be Farmer’s brother and the quasi-incestuous relationship that ensues adds an intriguing if queasy exploitation angle to the…
Perhaps not as well-known as their road trips to Morocco or Singapore, but Road to Utopia is one of Hope and Crosby’s funniest and most surreal films (screenwriters Melvin Frank and Norman Panama nabbed an Oscar nom). The boys play two vaudevillians searching for gold in turn of the century Alaska. Produced in 1943 but…
A vanity project from Tippi Hedren and her husband Noel Marshall, this 1981 thriller about a family under attack by angry jungle creatures was dubbed “the most dangerous movie ever made” thanks to numerous animal injuries suffered by cast and crew. That bruised and bloodied bunch included Hedren’s daughter Melanie Griffith and 70 other crew…
Often misidentified as a George Pal production, this popular sci fi thriller recycles space ships from War of the Worlds and space suits from Destination Moon in the service of a clever updating of Daniel Defoe’s original survivalist classic. Sadly, co-star Mona the Wooley Monkey seems to have retired after her screen debut.
It’s hard to fathom the concept that they remade this in 2014, as Paul Verhoeven’s now-classic original is one of the great science fiction movies of all time, and hardly dated at all. Followed by two inferior sequels.