Roger Corman recalls the frigid details of shooting this indie war picture for his non-union production company The Filmgroup on location in snowbound Deadwood, South Dakota. Shot back-to-back with The Beast from Haunted Cave, both from scripts by Corman warhorse Charles B. Griffith.

Otto Preminger’s legendary disaster was also Groucho Marx’s last movie, and he’s awful in it. The director’s characteristic browbeating probably didn’t help him much. Like Roger Corman, Preminger experimented with LSD to make this movie, but a few screenings of this hopelessly clueless effort could fund another ten years of “Just Say NO” propaganda. As…

Coproducer James Garner channels his winning Maverick persona as a pre-Civil War con man whose partner Louis Gossett Jr. poses as his slave. The two travel around “selling” Gossett to various slaveholders, then spring him and move on to the next mark. It’s a comedy, but a fairly serious-minded one. The familiar backlot and supporting…

Probably the most accomplished of the non-omnibus Amicus horror pix. Dedicated occult collector Peter Cushing scores a coup – the skull of the Marquis deSade. But it doesn’t make him –or anyone else–very happy!

In the great tradition of hockey comedies–wait, is there a tradition of hockey comedies? Anyway, this one was seriously undervalued in 1977 and is viewed today as a landmark in cynical sports humor as well as wall-to-wall profanity. Full of quotable dialog. A locker room favorite.

Long considered to be unfilmable, Kurt Vonnegut’s time-tripping 1969 novel was tamed for the screen by writer Stephen Geller and director George Roy Hill, who captured the essence of the book without being entirely faithful to it. Vonnegut said he would “drool and cackle” each time he watched the film, which he was very pleased…

For his first original screenplay Stephen King created the titular creatures of Sleepwalkers, twilight monsters similar to vampires and werewolves who require the life force of virgins to survive. TFH Guru Mick Garris’s first major studio movie features cameos from Clive Barker, Tobe Hooper, John Landis, Joe Dante, Mark Hamill and Stephen King himself.

Former editor Amy Holden Jones reveals a saga that could only have taken place in the bygone world of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and resulted in her first directorial assignment– a girls-in-jeopardy horror picture that led to a career as a successful Hollywood screenwriter. Sequels ensued. Read all about “20 Things We Learned from…

François Truffaut followed up the tragic The Story of Adele H with this sunny comedy about childhood innocence and resiliency (to show just how resilient, one baby falls out a window and merely bounces harmlessly off the bushes below). Truffaut worked with a stripped down script to allow for more improvisation from his young cast….

The bromide is that satire is what closes on Saturday night, and the box office reception to Michael Ritchie’s expose of small town beauty pageants certainly bears that out. The American Dream comes in for a drubbing, but Richie and screenwriter Jerry Belson have such affection for their characters that it’s uplifting rather than a…

Smile, Michael Ritchie’s aptly named 1975 film, takes aim at American beauty pageants and the sunnily eager contestants, their ravenous parents and long suffering chaperones. But the real reason to smile is Bruce Dern’s funny and touching performance as Big Bob Freelander, head judge of the contest and sometime used car dealer. Once again Ritchie…

Also known as Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, the third entry into the Burt Reynolds/Jackie Gleason good-old-boy car comedies has everything but Burt Reynolds. A beleaguered production from the get go, the plan was for Gleason to take over the Reynolds role in a dual role alongside his bumptious character, Sheriff Buford T. Justice. That…

Two decades after its release, society may have finally caught up with this 1992 comedy about conspiracy theorists, computer hackers and the currently topical NSA. With a uniquely quirky cast (including Ben Kingsley, Sidney Poitier and Dan Aykroyd) supporting star Robert Redford, this high tech caper film was, unsurprisingly, a box office success. The playfully…

Director Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 follow-up to his cult-fave The Host was an across-the-board critical hit but suffered from its limited release in art-house theaters. The film’s action is entirely relegated to the interior of a massive train inhabited by the last remaining survivors of earth, the result of a climate change experiment gone tragically wrong….

Robert Harling and Andrew Bergman wrote the super-smart script for this meta-comedy about the soap opera drama behind a soap opera drama. Directed by Michael Hoffman, the cast features Sally Field as a fading afternoon star and Cathy Moriarty as her unscrupulous rival – their character’s names, “Celeste Talbert” and “Montana Moorehead” are just more…

Wartime phenomena Bud and Lou at the height of their fame in one of their better-received vehicles, which happens to incorporate one of their best vaudeville reclaimations, the “Floogle Street” routine, here rechristened Bagel Street, but given short shrift in the trailer.

The box office success of From Here to Eternity, adapted from the James Jones best-seller, paved the way for this 1958 film based on the author’s follow-up novel. It’s another example of director Vincente Minnelli’s seemingly effortless mastery of the medium, here using the expansive Cinemascope lens to frame an intimate small-town tragedy (He claimed…

Under the radar comedy western from director Andrew McLaglen starring Dean Martin, Brian Keith and a surrealistic supporting cast including Honor Blackman, Ben Johnson and football star/announcer Merlin Olsen. The convoluted farce focuses on the last hurrah of bandit Joe Baker (Dino) before he settles down to married life.

This black comedy has fallen by the wayside since its release in 1970 and considering its rich pedigree, it deserves another look. Directed by Harold Prince and written by Hugh Wheeler, Angela Lansbury and Michael York play two social climbers ready to marry or murder anyone to get what they want. John Simon hated the film,…

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…