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,…
Michael Caine specialized in charming scoundrels and his role in Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job is one of his more memorable ne’er-do-wells. Caine is Charlie Coker, a canny crook with a big dream; swipe a cache of gold bullion from an armored tank as it grinds its way through Turin. His unlikely crew includes Benny…
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…
Bram Stoker gets the Ken Russell treatment in this arch, over the top but still creepily grotesque chiller, one of Hugh Grant’s early starring roles. Some of the ripely hysterical anti-clerical imagery seems to have been gleaned from the cutting room floor of The Devils. Has attained camp classic status over the years despite being…
Although this bittersweet French adventure-drama was one of Alain Delon’s biggest domestic hits in 1967, it was dumped onto double bills by US distributor Universal two years later and is undeservedly obscure today. Director Robert Enrico, perhaps best known to American audiences for the short film Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, directs Delon, Lino Ventura and Joanna Shimkus…
Robert Fuest’s 1973 film plays out in the world’s waning hours; Trafalgar Square is dust, the Vatican has disappeared. Jon Finch plays Jerry Cornelius, a playboy physicist with a James Bond complex. His preening self-confidence is tested when the secret of his late father’s invention makes him the target of his own family. Fuest loads…
Along with The Apple and Can’t Stop the Music, The Last Dragon stands at the pinnacle of 80’s WTF movie-making. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, co-produced this jaw-dropping mix of of martial arts and musical numbers that must be seen to be disbelieved. The bizarro plot revolves around a Bruce Lee acolyte who…
Even heavily invested fans of the great director may not have known about this little-seen film from Vittorio De Sica. A multi-storied phantasmagoria about the end of the world (announced from on high in a booming voice) the movie features a psychotronic cast worthy of Irwin Allen’s The Story of Mankind including Anouk Aimee, Jack…
It’s Vincent Price vs. plague-ridden zombie/vampires in a bleakly depopulated urban setting in this surprisingly influential US-Italian coproduction. Although it fell into into the public domain in the US its reputation has risen in recent years and parts of it seem eerily predictive of the coronoa virus situation. It’s available in its full TotalScope glory…
To the roster of forgotten comedy teams (Wheeler and Woolsey, Brown and Carney, Mitchell and Petrillo, etc.) can be added tv/nightclub comics Allen and Rossi, whose brief moment in the sun produced only a single feature film. This laboriously zany spy spoof features the charisma-challenged duo as inept would-be James Bonds with Hitchcock regular John…
The ghosts of Howard Hawks and John Ford hover over film buff/historian Peter Bogdanovich’s first studio movie after the impressive indie Targets. Orson Welles persuaded him to insist on shooting his Oscar winning adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical novel in black and white, unusual for the period. He followed it in 1990 with a sequel,…
Pop-eyed Brit comic Marty Feldman directs and stars in this wacky spoof chosen from a list of titles to which Universal owned the remake rights. Taken away from him and completely recut by the studio, it nevertheless ended up a critical and financial success. When the New York Times published a rave review, Feldman wrote…
Lance Guest plays a teen obsessed with an arcade game named “Starfighter” that turns out to be an intergalactic training vehicle. Thanks to his high scores, he’s whisked away by avuncular alien Robert Preston to join other warriors in protecting his home planet. Director Nick Castle (best known for portraying Michael Meyers in Halloween) was one of the…