“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…
Fans of Eugène Lourié—the man behind The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms—got a surprise when they settled in for his new film about a giant cyborg—along with the expected sci-fi thrills they found the melancholy tale of a dying man reincarnated as a giant robot, a space-age Frankenstein monster draped in Dracula’s cloak. Ross Martin plays…
Jacques Tourneur’s 1964 horror romp retains most of the actors and crew from Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations—including poster art from Reynold Brown. The film lacks the luster of Mr. Corman’s efforts but with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone on board, who’s complaining? Price and Lorre play luckless undertakers who start supplying…
Comedy buffs Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke re-teamed for this tribute to silent comedy centering on an egotistical star named Billy Bright. The plot juggles episodes culled from the careers of Langdon, Chaplin and Van Dyke’s friend Stan Laurel, but it actually hews closer to the life of Keaton than The Buster Keaton Story…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s glamorously beautiful investigation into the ugly nature of fascism (both political and emotional) is one of the great movies of the 70’s. Set in the early 30’s, Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as a hired killer working for a clandestine fascist organization who finds himself ordered to assassinate a friend. Bertolucci’s hypnotic, seductive camera movements, combined with his new wave sensibilities,…
Sandwiched in between his two Godfather triumphs, Francis Coppola’s tense thriller is a quietly malevolent masterpiece. Gene Hackman plays his reputedly favorite role as an obsessive surveillance expert whose recordings of a possible murder put him in jeopardy. Partially inspired by Antonioni’s Blow-up, this is the kind of grown-up movie they just don’t make anymore–remarkable…
A thrilling film noir and a pungent commentary on race relations circa 1959, The Crimson Kimono is one of Sam Fuller’s most striking films. James Shigeta and Glenn Corbett play two cops investigating a stripper’s murder in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. Ramping up the tension is Victoria Shaw as a key witness who both gumshoes…
Considerable production power (courtesy of Star Wars’ producer Gary Kurtz) was brought to bear on this 1982 fantasy epic from Jim Henson in what is essentially a 93 minute Muppet Show episode made on a grand scale and with a far grimmer atmosphere. Henson’s dream project was impeccably conceived with the help of English fantasy…
Moody, atmospheric B picture that recalls the Val Lewton formula of getting the most out of limited means. With one location and only six main characters, it manages to wring quite a bit of creepiness out of its familiar martian doppelganger premise. A nice example of our preferred format here at TFH, black-and-white Cinemascope.
A typically skewed horror satire from Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia, again combining gonzo exploitation thrills with the sardonic social commentary of his countryman, Luis Buñuel. Starring Álex Angulo (Pan’s Labyrinth) as a stouthearted priest with a uniquely wacky strategy to vanquish the devil.