In this controversial career-capping Japanese thriller from director Kinji Fukasaku, middle-school children are rounded up by the government and sent to an island where they’re made to compete in a particularly nasty game of hide and seek: each child must kill the other in order to win. The shocking premise and worldwide acclaim led several American distributors to…
FX maestro Ray Harryhausen’s first solo gig is a modestly budgeted indie that made a huge splash when picked up by Warner Bros. Director Eugene Lourie essentially remade this film twice, once as The Giant Behemoth, and again as Gorgo. This zippy trailer is very heavy on atomic paranoia. Look for Merv Griffin and Vera…
Robert Florey directed and Curt Siodmak wrote it, but Luis Bunuel’s fingerprints (heh, heh) are allegedly all over the concept for this earliest and best of the crawling hand movies. Dreamlike and intensely creepy, with a thundering Steiner score and Peter Lorre at his pop-eyed best in a role intended for Paul Henried. In any…
Out of circulation for decades, Peter Glenville’s acclaimed film of Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play was recently restored by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. Friendly rivals Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole once again don regal robes as Archbishop Thomas Becket and King Henry II, whose emotional relationship sours…
“I think man has no option but to continue his own stupidity” said co-author Spike Milligan of his post-apocalyptic 1962 play, filmed by Richard Lester in 1969. Underappreciated in its day, one critic pronounced it to be “like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes.” The distinguished cast of this existential Goon Show is billed “in…
The New Yorker called Stanley Donen’s Python-esque take on the Faust story “the intellectual’s Hellzapoppin’”.‚ Of course that was back when people were actually familiar with Olsen & Johnson’s‚ brilliantly Brechtian, now sadly obscure‚ comedy. Boldly funny, dryly understated‚ and defiantly offbeat, ‚ it’s rumored that this was remade in 2000 but no one we’ve…
TFH welcomes John Sayles to the ranks of Grindhouse Gurus. This nervy 1957 trailer acts like Bert I. Gordon’s shoestring ripoff of previous giant bug movies is some kind of innovative breakthrough! It does boast two ’50s sci fi icons in the cast (Morris Ankrum and Tom Browne Henry) in their signature roles as tough…
Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood used their combined boxoffice clout to get Universal to make this arty, Ambrose Bierce-like civil war gothic melodrama full of not-so-repressed psychosexuality. This trailer sells it like a Gone with the Wind soap opera. It flopped, but it’s a unique and creepy movie.
Spike Jonze directed this one-of-a-kind mind bender from the master of meta, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman’s Kafka-esque fantasy revolves around a down-and-out puppeteer (played by John Cusack) who discovers a hidden portal into the brain of an unsuspecting John Malkovich. Kaufman builds on the premise in one absurd scene after the other to create a…
The brilliant chameleon Peter Sellers turns in his greatest (and penultimate) performance in this low-key satire about politics and the cult of personality. Or in this case, the lack of personality: as Chance, a gentle shut-in untouched by the outside world except for what little knowledge he’s gleaned from TV, Sellers turns in a studious…
After dutifully playing straight man for The East Side Kids, Abbott & Costello, The Ritz Brothers and Old Mother Riley, Bela faces his greatest challenge, stooging for the flash-in-the-pan duo of Mitchell and Petrillo. At least there’s a guy in a gorilla suit.
This charmingly spooky romantic comedy has successfully resisted decades of attempts to remake it, in part because its cast could not be bettered. A beautifully mounted studio picture, it’s also an indelible Christmas movie reuniting Vertigo stars Kim Novak (replacing a pregnant Vera Miles) and James Stewart (in the role Rex Harrison originated in the…
One of the most successful remakes in Hollywood history, William Wyler’s eye-popping take on Fred Niblo’s 1925 spectacle Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (itself a remake of a 1907 short version) won 11 Oscars. The climactic chariot race ranks among the greatest action sequences in movie history. That’s Les Tremayne extolling the high-minded hyperbole…
The second of Anthony Mann and James Stewart’s must-see westerns, Bend of the River continues the duo’s trend of character-driven yet action-packed outdoor adventures, this time set in snowy Oregon. The fine actor Arthur Kennedy plays a perfectly ambiguous villain while the auburn-haired Julie Adams and Rock Hudson – just on the cusp of stardom – round…
This surprisingly downbeat first of four sequels remains the most profitable of the Apes series, primarily due to its comparatively low budget. None-too-subtle anti-Vietnam war undertones waft through writer Paul Dehn’s‚ subterranean ‚ rehash of the original, enhanced with the addition of nuclear warhead-worshipping‚ mutant heavies.
Best in Show continues director Christopher Guest’s series of satirical documentaries on the American institutions that attract some of our country’s finest eccentrics (we’re waiting for him to tackle comic con). Guest has built an informal repertory company around some of our best and brightest comedians and the gang’s all here including Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy…
Prolific Filipino exploitation king Eddie Romero takes a break from his Blood Island and girls-in-chains movies to try his hand at a pseudo-family oriented aquatic fantasy. It’s still squarely aimed at the drive-in trade, but it’s much less raunchy than the usual tropical action dualler. Makes a nice double bill with Romero’s similar Twilight People, made…
Ovidio Assonitis (credited as Oliver Hellman) directed this popular Exorcist rip-off, which inspired an unsuccessful lawsuit from Warner Bros. An open season of further Exorcist copies followed at home and abroad, but this was the trailblazer. Pregnant Juliet Mills alarms hubby Richard Johnson when she’s possessed by a projectile-vomiting demon. It was successful enough to…
It seemed like a good idea at the time– give the sequel to one of Fox’s soap opera hits to skinflick auteur Russ Meyer in the heady days of X-rated prosperity. Okay, it didn’t work out so well at the boxoffice, but it did give us a touchstone for big studio psychotronic insanity that has…
Director/writer Michael Schlesinger dug through some long-forgotten film archives and unearthed this quartet of shorts from America’s favorite fictional funny men, Biffle and Shooster. Lovingly shot in black and white (save for the Cinecolor “Schmo Boat”), the films recall 30’s audience’s infatuation with terrible puns and out-of-nowhere musical numbers.
Ray Milland is the fall guy in Charles Laughton and George Macready’s murder coverup.Told in the back-to-front flashback style unique to film noir, John Farrow’s ingenious, criminally undervalued mystery thriller sometimes skirts the edge of screwball comedy. This highly‚ entertaining thriller has‚ some intriguing plot similarities to both Welles’ Mr. Arkadin and Alain Corneau’s Police…
Jack Hill recalls the making of his mega-hit, the Roger Corman/Cirio Santiago jungle prison flick that started the avalanche of busty-broads-behind-bars pix that packed the drive-ins throughout the 70s. NSFW
John Wayne’s attempt to plant his legendary persona into an arena potentially more hostile than any he’d ever faced before: The Seventies. Thanks to a cadre of good friends, who also happen to be good actors, including Richard Boone and, touchingly, Maureen O’Hara, he nearly succeeds. This quasi-retread of The Searchers’ basic plot (Wayne is on the…
John Wayne wades into fraught political waters as Jim McLain, an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee who finds work busting a hotbed of communists in sun-kissed Honolulu circa 1952. Jim Arness, Wayne’s friend and future Gunsmoke star, is along for the ride. When the movie opened in Europe it was re-titled Marijuana and…
The famous example of the whodunit where none of the prestigious writers, including Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Howard Hawks, could ever really account for who did what to whom. A year after the film wrapped the studio added two new sequences to expand the presence of Lauren Bacall, by then Bogart’s inamorata, which entailed…
AIP’s 1966 followup to the smash rock concert hit The T.A.M.I. Show is fun but had less cultural impact. The lineup is stellar but producer Phil Spector didn’t hit the jackpot this time out.