Blithely thumbing his nose at the Hays office, Preston Sturges’s wartime farce concerns a virginal young woman who goes a little too far in her support for the troops – the fact that her name, Trudy Kockenlocker, is not the movie’s most outrageous element should tell you all you need to know. Starring Eddie Bracken and…
Low rent but affectionately made by professional monster movie fans, this modest Creature imitation didn’t garner many theatrical playdates but had a long afterlife on tv Double Chiller programs. The well constructed Monster is considerably less sympathetic than his Black Lagoon compatriot. The producers missed a bet by not hiring their lead actor, radio star Les…
Reuniting the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, the Wolfman and the Mummy for the first time since Paul Naschy’s Assignment Terror, director Fred Dekker’s affectionate horror comedy simultaneously salutes the classic Universal Monsters and the nostalgia for our own childhoods. Though the box office was initially meager, the film engendered the good will of critics and has endured as…
Too close for comfort, Frank Borzage’s 1940 drama reunites the stars of The Shop Around the Corner, James Stewart, Margret Sullavan and Frank Morgan, in far more ominous circumstances – the overthrow of Germany by fascist rule. One of the first Hollywood “resistance” films, the movie features Father Knows Best star Robert Young as an up and…
The pitfalls and pleasures of a love triangle are at the heart of Jean Eustache’s 1971 film. Produced during the heyday of Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci, Eustache dines off the cinematic freedoms those directors helped to win. Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Françoise Lebrun play the star-crossed lovers. Cahiers du cinéma called it the…
The second of Universal’s cookie-cutter sequels to 1933’s The Mummy and the first to star Lon Chaney Jr. This is a direct follow-up to the somewhat more lavish The Mummy’s Hand (thanks in large part to its appropriation of sets from Green Hell). Dick Foran and Wallace Ford, the stars of Hand, reappear, this time older but not much wiser as…
The onscreen title reads Ken Russell’s Film on Tchaikovsky and The Music Lovers, to differentiate it from a Russian film released the previous year. One of Russell’s most gloriously lurid fantasias, with Richard Chamberlain and Glenda Jackson brilliant as the haunted composer and his mad nymphomaniacal wife. Despite its many memorable and even shocking sequences…
Stuck in a steamy South American jungle and a decidedly unsteamy marriage, newlyweds Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker don’t find real love until they’re visited by a swarm of voracious army ants; the “marabunta.” Produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, this preposterously enjoyable film was based on Carl Stephenson’s pulp thriller, Leiningen…
Richard Fleischer’s thriller achieves classic noir status thanks to Earl Felton’s Oscar nominated script—the dialog is so hard boiled it sizzles. The terrific Charles McGraw plays a cop protecting a gangster’s girlfriend train-bound for the grand jury—assorted assassins and gangsters have other ideas. As the unmanageable mobster’s moll, the great Marie Windsor is one of…
Based on Michael Ende’s epic fable, Wolfgang Peterson’s adaptation is a story within a story: a bullied child takes refuge in a mysterious book of fantasy and finds himself the hero of the tale. Released in 1985, Peterson’s film was the most expensive to be produced outside of the United States but more than made…
An uncooperative Marlon Brando put director Hubert Cornfield through the ringer during this offbeat French-made kidnap thriller, but the resultant film still has its perverse merits. Look for the Rita Moreno bathtub scene where Brando showed up drunk and Cornfield had to cut around him.
The only movie directed by Charles Laughton but he made it count. A brilliant mix of heavenly poetry and harrowing horror film, James Agee’s script, seemingly influenced by the New Testament and Jim Thompson, tells the story of a psychotic preacher (played by a terrifying Robert Mitchum) and his unstoppable hunt for some stolen loot….
Produced by Dan Curtis and directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, The Night Stalker was one of the most popular TV movies in history, a bracing mix of retro horror and 70s exploitation with an inspired setting: Las Vegas, where everyone keeps vampire hours. Darren McGavin is none other than Carl Kolchak who is perhaps the…
TV’s Norman Lear produced William Friedkin’s good-natured farce about early American burlesque houses and the inadvertent invention of the striptease. Jason Robards plays a fast talking vaudevillian and Britt Ekland is Rachel Schpitendavel, a showbiz hopeful who hits the big time by losing her clothes. The supporting cast is a who’s who of comedians including…
This brutal revenge drama was director Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to her sleeper hit, The Babadook. Irish actress Aisling Franciosi plays a convict named Clare Carroll whose abuse at the hands of her captors is only the beginning of the nightmare visited upon her and her family. Some scenes were so grueling therapists were made available…
Stop motion animator Henry Selick made his feature film debut with this macabre yuletide fairy tale based on a poem by Tim Burton; the darkly comic result resembles a George Pal Puppetoon directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Chris Sarandon lends his voice to the film’s spindly hero, Jack Skellington, who brings the Christmas spirit to the…
It would seem that too many years had passed for this belated attempt to turn the popular Get Smart spy comedy series into a feature film to succeed, yet astonishingly it was a boxoffice hit despite its many departures from the spirit of the original. Brit Clive Donner may have seemed an odd choice to…
Probably Jerry Lewis’s most enduring film, and the one that sparked a critical reappraisal of his entire ouvre, this variation on The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll has inspired not only a 1996 Eddie Murphy remake and followup but an animated direct-to-video sequel and a proposed Broadway musical version directed by Jerry with music by…
A supernatural take on The Bad Seed, director Richard Donner’s 1976 thriller about a demonic child boasts a top-notch “old Hollywood” cast including Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. Gilbert Taylor (A Hard Day’s Night) did the cinematography and composer Jerry Goldsmith’s work was rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Score. This cash cow spawned three sequels…
This creepy, bucolic period horror film didn’t make much of an impression theatrically, but was rediscovered through late-night television airings. Although former actor turned best-selling author Tom Tryon wrote the screenplay from his own novel, he professed to be disappointed with To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan’s nostalgia-laced, Ray Bradburyish handling of it. Composer…
The story of The Other Side of the Wind – a film begun by Orson Welles in 1970 that finally arrived in theaters in 2018 – encapsulates the ongoing struggles of the great director when it came to getting a movie made. Finally assembled long after Welles’ death by Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall and editor…
This troubled production is considered by Clint Eastwood to be one of his best films. Audiences and critics agreed. Producer Eastwood was annoyed by director Philip Kaufman’s meticulous attention to detail and had him replaced by Eastwood himself, leading to a Directors Guild of America fine and the installation of The Eastwood Rule, designed to…
This is the oldest title we’ve ever featured on this site, mainly because it’s not easy to come up with silent-era trailers. Justly celebrated for Lon Chaney’s amazing performance and makeup, the film itself is a tattered amalgam of rewrites, reshoots and recuts, further complicated by more shooting for a sound-on-disc reissue. Originally all the…
Cary Grant starring in a Hammer Film? It almost happened! After a stillborn incarnation as an in-house Universal domestic production from producer William Alland, this third film version of Gaston Leroux’s warhorse finally emerged via Hammer with Herbert Lom in a very underrated performance as the benighted Phantom. When televised on NBC, the more intense…
Here’s a beloved bargain-basement gobbler that impressed little Micky Garris in 1961. It’s an amusing riff on Gulliver’s Travels with lots of ambition and little resource. Co-star Coleen Gray must have been wondering how she got from Kubrick’s The Killing to this in only five years!
This 1948 Vincente Minnelli musical could just as easily been titled The Technicolor Pirate, so blazingly vivid is the photography. The film itself, unfortunately, is not that blazing, the result of a troubled production history (it took four months to film) and on-set tension between Minnelli and his wife and star of the film, Judy Garland. It does have…