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…
The events surrounding the murder of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten make for one of the most unpleasant films to ever come out of Hollywood—it’s made even more unbearable by the heartbreakingly sweet presence of Mariel Hemingway as the doomed Playmate. Eric Roberts plays Dorothy’s deranged husband to a T and Bob Fosse directs in a…
Cary Grant was originally entreated by co-star Judy Garland to play fading star Norman Maine in this remake of the 1937 original, but when he stepped out James Mason took over to provide one of his most iconic performances. Director George Cukor (who had filmed the first version of the story, What Price Hollywood?) was outraged…
Barbra Streisand steps into the Judy Garland role in this big-scale musical remake that works pretty well on its own terms, but would have benefitted from the original casting choice for leading man, the superstar….well, we’ll let Adam Rifkin tell you about it.
Star Trek left the airwaves in 1969 but an army of avid fans not only kept the candle burning, they were part of an unending crusade that led to an epic big budget film version of the modestly produced television incarnation. Directed by Robert Wise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture features the same familiar crew; the hot-shot…
Italian fan-turned-director Luigi Cozzi (as “Lewis Coates”) specialized in energetic mini-budget spectacles inspired by his favorite movies, from Harryhausen to Hercules to Star Wars. This comic-book space opera is loaded with ambitious home-made special effects, but somehow the spectacle of ray gun-toting Caroline Munro strutting around in her leather bikini outdoes them all.
At the height of his critical enshrinement after hitting the jackpot with Annie Hall and Manhattan, Woody Allen attempted his own version of Fellini’s 8 1/2, about a filmmaker who re-examines his life and loves at a fan-filled retrospective of his works. It was roundly rejected by critics and audiences as a misjudged, cynical muddle of pretension and narcissism. Overlooked was the…
Seth Holt, the director of some of Hammer’s most distinctive films, steers this desert-bound potboiler about an overheated vamp whose jealous husband crashes their car into an isolated oil station. Carroll Baker plays the blonde seductress and Peter van Eyck is the sadistic boss determined to keep Baker to himself and his hot and bothered…