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,…
Steve Martin’s stand-up act combined equal measures of the stupid and the cerebral; he turned dropping your pants into a philosophical statement. By 1979, his remarkable on-stage success had gained him enough clout to write and star in his own film. Directed by his old friend Carl Reiner, The Jerk, is an often hilarious series of vignettes that expand on Martin’s…
Sabu plays Mowgli, a kinetic young adventurer who gets to cavort with a parade of talking animals in the most sumptuous jungle setting this side of the Garden of Eden. The 1942 film was a family affair, directed by Zoltán Korda, produced by his brother Alexander and art directed by his other brother Vincent. But the real stars are…
John Avildsen’s stirring 1984 film is a classic “the-worm-turns” tale starring Ralph Macchio as a bullied teenager and Pat Morita as the karate master who teaches him some valuable life lessons. The movie touched a nerve with critics and audiences alike and earned Morita an Academy Award nomination — though the studio had wanted Toshiro…
Wendell Corey plays bank clerk Leon Poole whose mild-mannered demeanor disguises a ruthless killer. Joseph Cotten plays the detective who killed Poole’s wife and makes his own wife a target for the deranged Poole. Director Budd Boetticher and cinematographer Lucian Ballard took a break from sagebrush dramas to shoot this atmospheric crime picture on the…
Based on the Cosmopolitan story about a real-life health crisis, Earl McEvoy directs this uniquely noirish thriller from a script by Harry Essex. Evelyn Keyes stars as a smuggler sick with Smallpox trying to pass off some hot diamonds while infecting everyone she meets. The 1950 film features a great B-movie cast with Lola Albright…
Preston Sturges’ screwball masterpiece is typical for the director, mixing outlandish slapstick with colorful characters and outrageous plot twists worthy of Mark Twain and Voltaire. There’s a touch of melancholy about the duplicitous romance between Barbara Stanwyck’s luscious but two-faced card shark and Henry Fonda’s hopelessly naive beer magnate but it’s mitigated by another stellar Sturges…
A shell of what may have been a great film. What remains of Orson Welles’ fourth Hollywood effort is dazzlingly inventive and narratively jumbled, due to Columbia prexy Harry Cohn cutting Welles’ version by nearly an hour. Still considered a key film noir, Dave Kehr once called it “the weirdest great film ever made”. The…
Alexander Mackendrick’s final film for Britain’s Ealing Studios is one of its most celebrated comedies as well as a pivotal film for an embryonic Peter Sellers, thrilled to be working with his idol Alec Guinness. Sellers later emulated Guinness by taking on numerous multi-character assignments. The macabrely witty (Oscar-nominated) script is a virtual catalog of…