There aren’t a lot of movies about Huguenots, but this landlocked pirate epic is one of them. Christopher Lee steals the show as a ruthless pirate captain invading an island settlement looking for treasure. Made as part of Hammer’s coproduction deal with Columbia, American contract players Kerwin Mathews and Glenn Corbett seem a bit out…
After a brief detour working in television and off Broadway, Robert Altman returned to the big screen with a vengeance in 1992’s The Player. Based on Michael Tolkin’s book about a murderous movie producer, the black-comic material seemed ready made for the acerbic director. Starring Tim Robbins as the guilty studio head, the film begins…
The posters for Irwin Allen’s 1972 disaster epic screamed “Hell Upside Down!” – in other words, the perfect movie for 2019. The canny Allen brought in A list actors like Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters and made sure all the thriller buttons were pushed in this waterlogged saga about the spectacular upending of a leaky…
Albert Zugsmith and Mickey Rooney’s 1960 film about a band of misfits transported back to the Garden of Eden plays like a sexploitation farce written by Rod Serling. The movie never lives up to the salacious possibilities of its title but with its wacky casting coups (including Rooney as the devil and Mamie Van Doren…
All-star cold war thrills from the writer of North By Northwest set against the colorful background of the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. The basic plot gimmick involving dual roles for Edward G. Robinson was later lifted for a Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie, The Spy with My Face. The huge cast is tops. Britt Ekland…
A quintessential piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, Richard Brooks’ post-Mexican revolutionary western is star-studded, action packed and completely satisfying.
Directed by Gregory Widen, The Prophecy features the scrambled plot and supernatural characterizations of a Marvel Universe movie. Christoper Walken plays the angel Gabriel, who comes to earth in search of a useful “evil” soul but has to deal with the angel Simon, played by Eric Stoltz. Different, to be sure, the film sports a…
Jack Clayton’s moody tone poem stands alongside Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Shoot the Moon as one of the more coruscating portraits of a troubled marriage. While Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch trade blows as the unhappy couple, a devious James Mason pulls the strings on the sidelines. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay, Oswald…
It was bound to happen, The Puppetoons meet Gumby in Arnold Leibovit’s 1987 tribute to director/animator George Pal. The film features 11 of the shorts Pal made between 1933 and 1948, some of the most charming animation ever produced – the essence of childhood fantasy. Pal’s classic work is also supplemented by newly animated wraparound…
One of the more unique projects of the decade, director/writer Michael Tolkin’s disturbing 1991 religious fantasy tells the story of Sharon (Mimi Rogers), a young libertine converted to born-again Christianity, who takes drastic measures to ensure that the coming “Rapture” will “save” her young daughter. It’s provocative, to say the least, and in his debut…
Audie Murphy goes back to war and doesn’t like it. Still the best film version of Stephen Crane’s classic Civil War saga despite being metaphorically dragged from the back of a truck by MGM. Murphy reportedly offered to buy the picture back from MGM and let Huston re-edit it, but it was not to be….
You can’t keep a good man down. Despite being killed off in the original, the natty LA vampire’s on the loose again in a somewhat more elaborate but still chintzy sequel. The last screen appearance of longtime movie villain George Macready, whose son produced. A planned sequel with Yorga creating a zombie army in underground…
A studio contract player has to accept what he’s assigned to, which explains Bogart’s presence in this 1939 horror sequel from the Warner B unit. Hardly his finest hour, but Bogart doesn’t phone it in.
Terence Fisher returns to direct the first (and best?) of six sequels to the groundbreaking Curse of Frankenstein, bringing new complexity and plenty of gallows humor to the character of Baron Frankenstein, the alternately malevolent and admirable protagonist whose grand experiments just never seem to work out.
James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart go head-to-head in Raoul Walsh’s brutal crime thriller set in the Prohibition era. The duo play GIs who hit it rich after the war by running bootleg gin—naturally, greed gets in the way of their partnership. Luminous Priscilla Lane plays the girl that got away. Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, and…
In its time the most expensive French film ever made, Jean Renoir’s 1939 tragicomedy takes a scalpel to the upper class and their casual cruelty. After a flurry of bad reviews, Renoir took a scalpel to the film itself, but even a shortened version couldn’t appease critics which included the French government—they banned the film…
It took decades for this sleaze classic to be appreciated. It provided Vilmos Zsigmond with his first solo d.p. credit (as William Zsigmond), and it looks terrific. Grinning lunatic Arch Hall Jr. terrorizes three teachers in a desert junk yard for 94 real-time minutes in a little-seen but powerfully intense mini-budget drive-in staple. Hall even resembles Charles Starkweather,…
John Sturges’ 1965 film flaunts Cold War thrills and Strangelovian plot turns worthy of an Alistair MacLean novel – which is just where the story came from. It’s a typically solid Sturges production with prime work from cinematographer Robert Surtees and composer Jerry Goldsmith. Star George Maharis is a colorless leading man but vets Richard…
Last of the Hammer Draculas. A barely seen swan song, general neglect has relegated this one to the fuzzy world of the public domain, where it can be had most anywhere for 99 cents as well as part of various cheapo “100 Horror Classics” DVD boxes.
Los Angeles and its inhabitants are presented in the starkest of terms in this faux documentary written and directed by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick. Produced over a four-year period, Haskell Wexler was one of three cinematographers who followed the seemingly aimless journey of Barbara Baxley as Judith X, a divorcée adrift in…
Director Clio Barnard’s 2013 film is an unflinching look at the hard scrabble lives of two teenage misfits growing up in a poverty-stricken area of post-Thatcher England. The two boys, who earn their money collecting and selling scrap metal, fall in with a Fagin-like dealer whose shady ways lead to inevitable tragedy. The film was very…
Jeffrey Konvitz’s best-selling horror novel was brought to the screen by Michael Winner, considered in some circles one of cinema’s great vulgarians. With the aid of a top-notch cast Winner threw any notion of good taste to the winds, resulting in one of the most non-p.c. studio movies ever.
Russ Meyer, legendary for his lascivious approach to cheerfully lurid fare like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen, plays it relatively straight in this adaptation of trash-meister Irving Wallace’s free-speech manifesto on pornography. The result is neither fish nor fowl and something that had never existed till The Seven Minutes – a dull Russ Meyer movie….
Vienna-born Fred Zinnemann’s first major MGM directorial assignment is an uncommonly intelligent and well researched anti-Nazi film. Spencer Tracy plays an embittered escapee from a concentration camp whose faith in humanity is restored when others help him reach the Dutch border. Adding authenticity is the unbilled presence in the cast of several actual German refugees,…
Even Jerry Goldsmith’s score and an oddball supporting cast – including Tim Curry and Jonathan Winters – couldn’t hypnotize moviegoers into making Martin Bregman’s 1994 thriller a hit. Alec Baldwin stars as The Shadow, a crime-fighting master of mind-control inspired by 30’s pulp fiction and a popular radio show. The film opened to both indifferent critics and…
Stanley Kubrick’s stylish adaptation of Stephen King’s popular novel was pilloried by disappointed King fans who railed against its infidelity to the book, but it went on to become the hit that Kubrick was looking for after the commercial failure of Barry Lyndon. Now, of course, thanks to the recent documentary Room 237, we know…