From the Golden Era of Eddie Murphy hits comes this offbeat combination of comedy and mysticism. It’s sort of like a Bob Hope version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Critics were not kind, but today it’s regarded as a quintessential exemplar of the ’80s studio aesthetic, troubled production history and all.
Last and biggest of Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy, this Euro western classic dazzles with gorgeous imagery and sheer scope. Filled with memorable setpieces, none more grand than Eli Wallach’s delirious graveyard run to the pounding strains of Ennio Morricone’s “Ecstasy of Gold”. The term “horse opera” was never so apt.
Dustin Hoffman was nearly 30 when he played his star-making role as college student Benjamin Braddock, a part he landed when producer Lawrence Turman rejected Robert Redford as too movie star handsome. Similarly, Anne Bancroft inherited her signature role as Mrs. Robinson when Doris Day turned it down (what a different movie that would have…
Best known for The Dick Dyke Show, director Jerry Paris manages to inject some needed humor in this bleak tale of broken dreams. Jacqueline Bisset plays an aspiring dancer who gets off on the wrong foot in Vegas and doesn’t recover. Jim Brown is her good-hearted husband and Joseph Cotten is the reprobate who assists…
Who knew The Little Tramp was the original Antifa? In Charlie Chaplin’s first “official” sound film, the comedian has a lot to say, most of it about the fascist peril then overwhelming Europe. Though the film is occasionally preachy, it’s propaganda of the most righteous form and hilarious to boot. Chaplin plays both the tramp…
Ken Shapiro’s The Groove Tube coasted on the backs of Mad Magazine and in particular National Lampoon—an edgy humor mag so popular that in the early 70s it produced a comedy revue starring Chevy Chase called Lemmings. Chase is also one of the stars of Shapiro’s amiable 1974 satire which has the hit and miss…
Chuck Bail, a stuntman turned director, goes with what he knows in this 1976 comedy about an illegal cross-country road race. Michael Sarrazin is a wealthy candy maker who instigates the party (code name “Gumball”) and his car-happy co-stars include Raul Julia and Gary Busey. Dominic Frontiere, composer for The Outer Limits, did the freewheeling…
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…