Something Wild, Jonathan Demme’s screwball thriller from 1986, makes good on its title and then some. Jeff Daniels plays a mild-mannered IRS agent caught in the orbit of a flaky small time thief played by Melanie Griffith. The film proceeds as a funny, quirky rom-com á la Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby until the arrival of Griffith’s sociopathic ex-husband, played…
This adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel was Paul Newman’s second directorial effort. Newman stars with Henry Fonda and Lee Remick as The Stampers, an Oregon logging family embroiled in a bitter struggle with the local union and other loggers. John Gay wrote the screenplay and longtime character actor Richard Jaeckel earned an Oscar nomination for…
The most underrated of the wartime Universal horror films is steeped in atmosphere and situations that anticipate later vampire pictures. Lon Chaney is Count Alucard (the first time that now-wheezy moniker was employed) who materializes at a Southern mansion looking for new blood, and finds it.
Everybody’s favorite director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is dodging bill collectors who want him to pay for King Kong’s Big Apple antics and finds himself back on Skull Island with the lovely Helen Mack in this hastily-produced sequel. A family tragedy during production resulted in fx genius Willis O’Brien entrusting some of the animation to…
The last “official” appearance by a 52 year-old Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster gives this 1939 entry a melancholy tone that’s dispelled whenever Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi appear as the one-armed Inspector Krogh and the double-dealing Ygor. Basil Rathbone stars as the unflappable Wolf von Frankenstein though the notion of giving life to…
This‚ elaborate second remake of the French classic Wages of Fear (following Violent Road, a 1958 Howard W. Koch B-picture starring Brian Keith) suffered at the box office from its supernatural-sounding title (especially coming from the director of The Exorcist), which obscured its origins as a nail-biting suspense classic.‚ Two tough, grueling hours‚ that grab…
Director William Friedkin followed up his box office smash The Exorcist with this comparatively little-seen remake of Clouzot’s great The Wages of Fear. A pity because this star-crossed production (including hellish shooting conditions in the Dominican Republic) has much to offer featuring a suitably world-weary performance by Roy Scheider, rain-drenched photography by John Stephens and…
Jack Hill gives us the lowdown on the tsuris behind his spoofy low budget fantasy epic (credited onscreen to “Brian Stuart”), a paradigm of the kind of movies VHS was made for. Okay, there are no sorceresses to be seen, but we do get a pair of hot medieval barbarian twins, daughters of an evil…
Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama takes us through the 1948 film version of Lucille Fletcher’s 1943 radio play, one of the most‚ successful and popular programs ever. It was reprised seven times through 1960, each time starring Agnes Moorehead in the tour-de-force lead as a bedridden woman who overhears a murder being plotted. After being…
Police investigate a ticking time bomb which turns out to be a metronome. That witty scene is the perfect set up for this low-budget, off-kilter comedy from Swedish directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärneabout about a band of “terrorist” musicians who express themselves via kidnapping and bank robberies and the tone deaf, music-hating cop determined…
Walter Hill’s 1981 thriller finds a National Guard unit trapped in a bloody cat-and-mouse game with local Cajuns in the Louisiana bayou. With its strong echoes of Deliverance, the film is suitably suspenseful and Hill’s direction is typically taut and efficient. Keith Carradine and Fred Ward star as two of the beleaguered guardsmen, the atmospheric…
Set in the distant future of 2022, Soylent Green is an ecological thriller with a twist ready-made for The Twilight Zone. Charlton Heston is a detective who discovers the synthetic food produced by the omniscient Soylent Corporation features a stomach-churning special ingredient. Richard Fleischer directs a terrific supporting cast including Chuck Conners, Joseph Cotten, and,…
This last in the Jack Arnold/William Alland series of ’50s sci-fi classics is a low key (and lower budget) plea for galactic peace and hasn’t been generally available for decades. But we’d like to think our revival of the trailer on TFH a few years ago factored in Olive Films’ decision to release it on…
Credited to Stanley Kubrick, taking over from Anthony Mann (whose casting choices appear in abundance)after 11 days of shooting, this troubled epic from revered Lefties Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast has become a touchstone of 60s cinema and for good reason — it’s less pious and more honestly moving than the comparatively overblown Ben-Hur.
The Wachowskis’ $120 million big studio live-action version of Tatsuo Yoshida’s 52-episode anime series (syndicated to US tv during the 1967-68 season) was a major critical and commercial flop even after 17 years of development, which variously involved such names as Julien Temple, Gus Van Sant, Alfonso Cuaron, J.J. Abrams, Vince Vaughan, Johnny Depp and…
Once likened to a sitcom directed by Luis Bunuel, Jack Hill’s bizarre mini-budget debut feature was barely seen until the video revolution. This one-of-a-kind jet-black comedy casts Lon Chaney as the harried caretaker of an inbred family of homicidal maniacs. Weird, dark and funny, with standout performances by Chaney, Sid Haig and the mesmerizing Jill…
This classic mockumentary about The World’s Loudest Heavy Metal Band was largely improvised before unsuspecting patrons of various LA rock emporiums, who accepted Spinal Tap as a real band. May be the best film of its type ever.
Actor Andrew Duggan was Warner Bros.’ go-to guy for folksy 60s voiceovers, and he supplies a warm tone to this trailer for Elia Kazan’s popular teen drama. Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood’s Romeo and Juliet suffer nobly from living on different sides of the train tracks in William Inge’s bittersweet reminiscence of his formative years…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week is all about the laffs, as we come up with wines to pair with a trio of films that take a comedic look at other genres. No fooling. The 1999…
“Spook” being both a racial slur and slang for CIA agent, Ivan Dixon’s filmization of Sam Greenelee’s 1969 novel is one of the most astonishing Hollywood films of the Nixon era. Not merely subversive but a genuinely revolutionary call to arms, it’s not exactly polished but it is passionate. Original distributor UA pulled it from…
Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber star in this thoughtful Odd Couple drama about two maintenance men who develop an unexpected father-son relationship. This was writer/director Tom Gilroy’s first film and his subtle approach paid off, Spring Forward won the Discovery Award for Best First Film at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival.
The irrepressible (and who would try?) Lloyd Kaufman gives us the lowdown on the Troma Team’s first big hit, a “world series of laughs” in which disgruntled girlfriends form an all-girl softball team to challenge their macho boyfriends’ team. Notable for what is probably the pre-eminent cinematic depiction of a softball being caught between a…
Worms Gone Wild! The debut film of underrated director Jeff Lieberman is another entry in the popular 1970s nature-strikes-back genre, filmed on location in Georgia and a slimy drive-in staple for the next decade.
Bernard Kowalski’s SSSSSSSS joins 1954’s Phffft and Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s in the Onomatopoeic Movie Title Club. An unofficial remake of 1959’s The Alligator People, this 1973 shocker features mad doctor Strother Martin experimenting with a serum capable of turning men into snakes. Two years later producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown worked on another thriller with a bit more bite, Jaws.
John Ford’s enduring milestone (his first sound western) was the film that Orson Welles studied over and over before embarking on Citizen Kane. Dudley Nichols’ adaptation of Ernest Haycox’s story for Collier’s magazine,”Stage to Lordsburg,” was the first of many Ford films shot in Monument Valley, then one of the least accessible locations in the…
1968’s Star!, a big budget biography of Gertrude Lawrence, was a risky endeavor, even with Robert Wise at the helm and Julie Andrews in the title role. The risk didn’t pay off—as one of the last Roadshow attractions of the sixties, the three hour Star! was ignored at the box office in favor of esoteric mind-benders…