“The management reserves the right to put up the lights any time the audience becomes too emotionally disturbed!” crowed the poster for this Mexico-set monster rally, which also urged to crowd “not to panic or bolt from your seats”. It’s doubtful the lights went on anywhere, but there may have been some snoring during the…

Old-fashioned in the best possible way, Carroll Ballard’s 1979 film about a boy and his horse deserves to be called timeless. The simple story; a boy trains a wild stallion to compete in a championship race with the help of a retired jockey played by Mickey Rooney. The film stars Kelly Reno as the determined…

1958’s The Blob proves just as adaptable to the times as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing in this remake helmed by Chuck Russell and co-written with Frank Darabont. Laced with cheeky humor and post-Watergate paranoia, the movie is memorable for Russell’s nimble direction and a quick-witted cast that includes Shawnee Smith and…

Most of the voluminous cameo roles in TFH Guru John Landis’s landmark rock comedy were performed on studio sound stages, but the death defying car crash stunts were shot right on the streets of Chicago. This is the premier movie of those generated by Saturday Night Live. The preview version was shorn from 148 minutes…

Directed by Tony Richardson, this 1982 “neo-noir” stars Jack Nicholson as Charlie Smith, a border agent up to his neck in a human smuggling scheme run by his glad-handing partner played by Harvey Keitel. The fine cast is rounded out by Warren Oates and Valerie Perrine, but it’s Nicholson who shines in one of his…

Richard Fleischer, director of 1959’s Compulsion, revisits the true-crime genre with 1968’s The Boston Strangler. The sordid nature of the material would make it a natural for the 42nd Street audience but the presence of Henry Fonda as a tenacious police detective and Tony Curtis as the infamous killer made sure the film was a…

Roger Donaldson took over the reins from David Lean for this revisionist take on Mutiny on the Bounty, a film made instantly appealing by its dream cast; Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian, Anthony Hopkins as William Bligh, and a supporting crew made up of Laurence Olivier, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Liam Neeson. A more than respectable…

Set on the French Riviera during the roaring 20’s, Sandy Wilson’s smash 1954 London musical production ran for 2,078 performances to great acclaim. Julie Andrews made her Broadway debut in the starring role the same year, but when Ken Russell mounted his 1971 film version he chose current pop culture icon Twiggy for the lead,…

Directed by Bruno VeSota and produced by Roger Corman and star Ed Nelson, this six-day production has a can-do attitude that’s difficult to dismiss. Nelson plays a scientist investigating space parasites that are turning his friends into mind-controlled killers—one of those zombies is played by Leonard Nimoy. Being a Corman production it features a nifty…

“Memorable” is the word for Nathan Juran’s inadvertently surreal science fiction film from 1957—”ridiculous” comes to mind too: it’s a movie so preposterous the director took cover behind a pseudonym. John Agar plays a wide-eyed scientist whose eyes only get wider when he’s possessed by an airborne brain named Gor. The balloon-like creature has plans…

Shot near Tarrytown, New York as “The Head That Wouldn’t Die”, this sleazy little gem sat unreleased for two years until AIP picked it up in 1962. Their numerous censor cuts for reasons of “good taste” (as if!) have been since restored and the whole sordid farrago is now available pretty much everywhere in its…

This inconsequential comic fantasy from 1964 remains a rainy day favorite thanks to the peerless Tony Randall who stars as an agitated architect getting some unwanted assistance from a very persistent genie played by the always affable Burl Ives. A lighter-than-air mix of magic spells and harem girls, it almost certainly pointed the way to co-star…

Based on a story by the then blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, Irving Rapper’s The Brave One is a heart tugging drama about a little Mexican boy named Leonardo and his bigger-than-life pet, a bull named Gitano. Trumbo would win—pseudonymously—1957’s Academy Award for Best Story.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s kaleidoscopic retelling of The Bride of Frankenstein does not want for ingenious ideas, and at times the script (written by Gyllenhaal) suffers from too many of those ingenious ideas. But The Bride! is a genuinely daring attempt to blend horror and romance. The revived corpse at the center of the story (and boy…

An angora-loving gorilla sets his sights on the curvy heroine in this bizarre Ed Wood jungle concoction that’s evaded the Golden Turkey brigade only because he didn’t direct it. They don’t make ’em like this anymore, and anyway, they hardly ever did.

Oscar-nominated Gary Busey lost 32 pounds to play doomed rocker Holly, who weighed 146 at the time of his death. Busey had previously been slated to play Crickets drummer Jerry Allison in an aborted earlier attempt to dramatize Holly’s life called Three Sided Coin, which was cancelled by 20th Century Fox over rights issues. Director Steve…

Director Joe Dante is fond of quoting the New York Times review that stated “The ‘Burbs is as empty as a movie can be without actually creating a vacuum”. But over the years this odd ensemble piece, shot in sequence due to a concurrent writers’ strike, has developed a hardy cult following of fans who…

Paul Wendkos directed this 1957 noir from the screenplay (and book) by David Goodis, the writer responsible for Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield are a duo of unlikely jewel thieves and Martha Vickers, the problem child of Bogart’s The Big Sleep, is still a beautiful fly in the ointment. 

When Hammer Studios plumbed the real world for material the results could be very grim indeed – The Camp on Blood Island is no exception. Val Guest’s 1958 shocker is a grisly war drama with a real Catch 22  – the war is over yet a band of POWs has to conceal that fact or die. André Morell…

Michael Ritchie’s acerbic satire on the backroom maneuvers of political campaigning seems like a soothing bedtime story compared to the surreal finale of the 2016 campaign. Robert Redford found his perfect casting as the pretty boy candidate who gains in the polls as he allows his true convictions to fall by the wayside. Peter Boyle and Melvyn…

In Universal’s long history of memorable monsters, the least personable must surely be the devil-possessed automobile that hits and runs through the southwest in one of the worst reviewed movies of its decade. Nonetheless Elliot Silverstein directs as if he believes it and Jaws-With-a-Car has survived as a goofy artifact of the auto-obsessed culture of…

A wild west version of Cat People, director Lesley Selander’s horror film features one strange-looking villain, a pointy-eared cat-creature prowling the range in top hat and tux. To call Selander prolific is an understatement, he made over 100 westerns for Republic Pictures but Catman is one very odd man out; produced in 20 days in…

Kim Yoon-suk plays a former policeman turned pimp in this South Korean thriller directed by Na Hong-jin. Yoon-suk’s stable of call girls is dying at the hands of a psycho-killer and he relies on his detective skills to track down the maniac. The film itself has a maniacal energy—it isn’t called The Chaser for nothing—and…

Max Kalmanowicz’s low budget shocker about zombified children wreaking havoc on a small New England town at least borrows from the best – the kids are transformed by a toxic chemical cloud a la The Incredible Shrinking Man. These kids don’t shrink but instead wander the streets with dark eyes and blackened fingernails zapping adults…

Visionary Italian director Michele Soavi helmed this unique monster-fest five years before the release of his signature work, the apocalyptic Dellamorte Dellamore. The 1989 chiller finds a group of explorers trapped inside a demon-infested church rigged with devilish Rube Goldberg-like contraptions set to ensnare any unsuspecting trespassers. Feodor Chaliapin Jr., son of the opera-singing star of…

Martin Scorsese’s 10th feature (discounting documentaries) doesn’t get much love, as it tends to be compared unfavorably to its progenitor, Robert Rossen’s 1961 classic The Hustler. Paul Newman won the Oscar that eluded him the first time he played “Fast Eddie” Felson, the now-aging hotshot who’s lured back to the pool room by costar Tom…