John Frankenheimer’s film about a band of highflying skydivers was marketed as an action film when much of the film is grounded along with the daredevils. The box office reflected moviegoers disappointment but the cast, including Lancaster, Deborah Kerr and Gene Hackman, is unusually strong and Frankenheimer himself regarded it as one of his best…
The formidable action director John Sturges added laughs to his bag of tricks with this old west spoof starring Burt Lancaster and Lee Remick. Lancaster plays a Cavalry man pressed into escorting a reformist firebrand played by Remick who’s determined to stop delivery of a shipment of whiskey to Denver, home to a sizable crew…
Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, William Wellman’s 1932 melodrama is as hard-boiled as a pre-code film could get and paved the way for more explicitly bloody action in Hammer’s own Terror of the Tongs. Robinson is Wong Low Get, a man with a particularly sharp axe to grind and a ravishing Loretta Young (almost unrecognizable…
Although seeming quite a bit like one of Roger Corman’s period Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, it’s actually a slight digression in that it’s not based on Poe at all but on an H.P. Lovecraft story. Economical but imaginative, it offers two Vincents for the Price of one and pairs them with Lon Chaney for the…
Charles Grodin was passed over for the lead in The Graduate, but gets to play a similar role here as Peter Pan syndrome sufferer Lenny Kantrow, who falls for shiksa goddess Cybill Shepherd days after marrying his annoying wife Jeannie Berlin. Both films share similar endings as well, but Elaine May’s comic take is darker…
Jack Sholder’s sci-fi satire finds Michael Nouri and a suspiciously Agent Cooper-like Kyle MacLachlan on the trail of a slimy space worm who uses unsuspecting humans to navigate around town including, most amusingly, Claudia Christian as a stripper who suddenly exhibits an unearthly facility with heavy artillery. For a low budget film the effects are first rate….
Not widely distributed (more kids saw the photos in Famous Monsters of Filmland than ever saw the movie), actor-turned-producer/director Robert Clarke’s home-made vehicle is remembered fondly today primarily for one of the cooler monster masks of the ’50s.
William Wellman’s soap opera in the sky is the granddaddy of disaster films, in particular Airport and its many sequels. John Wayne plays the harried pilot who experiences more than his share of turbulence including jealous husbands and an airliner that is slowly dismantling itself. Claire Trevor, Wayne’s old flame from Stagecoach, is on board along with Robert Stack as The…
Michael Peyser is a little cooler than we are to Sidney Lumet’s ultra-cinematic adaptation of Ray Rigby’s adaptation of his play set in a brutal British military prison in the Libyan desert. Sean Connery was thrilled to land this serious role after feeling marginalized by his identification with James Bond. He’s terrific in this, as…
Just a couple of years before being swallowed by a shark Robert Shaw co-starred with Sarah Miles in this searing tale of class envy and unrequited love. Shaw is the former sergeant-major reduced to chauffeuring the fickle Miles who loves and leaves him. Shaw, best-known for his two-fisted action roles, gives a heartbreaking performance. Miles…
Sometimes described as a gruesome take on Duel, Robert Harmon’s 1986 horror film takes a different but no less unnerving path than Spielberg’s 1971 thriller. C. Thomas Howell is the careless motorist who makes the mistake of giving a lift to a memorably deranged Rutger Hauer. Jennifer Jason Leigh co-stars.
A dysfunctional family faces its fears in a retro-80s style horror film from TFH Guru Joe Dante. Although this is the newest title we’ve featured on Trailers from Hell, it’s still not brand-new, since it’s been awaiting US distribution for three years. And now that it’s finally getting out there this week via Big Air…
A dysfunctional family faces its fears in a retro-80s style horror film from TFH Guru Joe Dante. Although this is the newest title we’ve featured on Trailers from Hell, it’s still not brand-new, since it’s been awaiting US distribution for three years. And now that it’s finally getting out there this week via Big Air…
A dysfunctional family faces its fears in a retro-80s style horror film from TFH Guru Joe Dante. Although this is the newest title we’ve featured on Trailers from Hell, it’s still not brand-new, since it’s been awaiting US distribution for three years. And now that it’s finally getting out there this week via Big Air…
Jack Benny used this film’s disappointing box office as a long-running gag but that shouldn’t keep fans (or even non-fans) from seeking it out, it’s a real curio. Supposedly a jaunty comic-fantasy, Raoul Walsh’s 1945 film carries an undeniably dark undertone as musician Benny dreams he’s an angel of doom whose trumpet will signal the end of the…
Generally considered the nadir of the Hammer Frankenstein series, this campy replay of The Curse of Frankenstein misfires in a variety of directions. As fate would have it, it went out on a US double bill with The Scars of Dracula, itself the low point of Hammer’s Dracula series. Brian Trenchard-Smith created this trailer and…
This mini-budget Connecticut-shot indie originally featured garbage-like monster designs that recalled the Mad Magazine character The Heap (pictured here) but somewhere along the way these pollution-created monsters were reimagined to look more like the rubbery “bears” familiar from The Outer Limits tv series. Some theaters encouraged customers to sign a “Fright Release” before they could…
One of the year’s big hits in its original Spanish 70mm version, but in America it was just another drive-in horror dualler for AIP. Even in its GP-rated cut there’s a lot of creepy eroticism on view, and the girls’ school setting provides lots of pulchritude, if not much nudity.
RKO’s biggest budget film to date remains one of the finest literary adaptations ever, and is arguably Charles Laughton’s greatest screen role. His protege Maureen O’Hara never looked more stunning as the gypsy girl. Among the actors considered for Quasimodo were Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains, Robert Morley and Lon Chaney Jr., whose father…
John Frankenheimer directed this adaption of Eugene O’Neill’s play for the American Film Theatre, a company dedicated to bringing broadway to the movie house. The very essence of risky business, Frankenheimer’s 1973 film runs close to 4 hours and features some of Hollywood’s finest actors in decidedly un-Hollywood-like roles. Lee Marvin, Fredric March and the…
The solitary reason for this film’s existence is to watch a human being dissolve into a puddle of guts and gore over the course of 82 minutes and at this it succeeds mightily, thanks to the movie’s real star, make-up wizard Rick Baker. The film stars Alex Rebar as an astronaut just returned from a…
Petrified is right! 30 percent new movie plus 70 percent stock footage equals one of the more outrageous excuses for a feature film since, well, since the previous Jerry Warren picture! But you gotta hand it to Jerry — he made Ed Wood look like Bernardo Bertolucci, but he got these things made and people…
Like its inspiration, Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, Jack Arnold’s 1957 shocker expertly juggles sci-fi thrills, metaphysics, and a shrewd metaphor for suburban angst in Cold War America. The film is upheld by fine performances from Grant Williams as the humiliated husband who takes up residence in a doll house, and Randy Stuart as his…
In his behind the camera debut, actor Sean Penn wrote and directed this unheralded ’60s era Nebraska-set drama inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s song Highway Patrolman. The last film of actress Sandy Dennis, who plays the wife of Charles Bronson in one of his last substantial dramatic roles. Look for Benicio Del Toro in his third…
Sci-fi icon Robby the Robot followed his breakthrough role in Forbidden Planet with a comparative B picture which nonetheless gave him better billing. Despite its many amusing qualities this one has pretty much slipped through the cracks and is seldom mentioned in the company of more famous A.I. pix like Colossus: The Forbin Project and 2001….
A wonderfully creepy mix of modern-day science and old-fashioned horror, Boris Karloff plays Janos Rukh whose radioactive research turns him into a glow-in-the-dark monster. Bela Lugosi plays, for once, a commonsensical and kindly scientist who labors over a cure for his ill-fated friend. Directed by Lambert Hillyard with a top notch crew of Universal regulars,…