Roger Corman bids farewell to his Edgar Allan Poe series with a beautifully mounted departure from the heavy stylization of previous entries, played more like a gothic romance. Vincent Price would go on to topline an eccentric collection of further Poe “adaptations”, some of them in name only. Elizabeth Shepherd is a strong proto-Jane Austen…
Ken Russell’s overpowering fantasia is a psychedelic reimagining of The Who’s 1969 rock opera, moving the period from post WWI to post WW2, with new songs added and many liberties taken with both book and music. It made quite a splash in 1975, not only due to Russell’s brilliant pop imagery but the one-time-only debut…
Critics, ticket buyers, and even Hitchcock himself had mixed feelings about 1969’s Topaz, a Cold War thriller adapted from Leon Uris’s bestseller. Though the film relied on European stars like Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Krimi queen Karin Dor, the Hitchcock touch won over American audiences. The press got on board too: Sir Alfred took…
One of a kind co-production between 20th Century Fox and Japan’s Toei Studios depicts the fateful (mostly wrong) decisions leading up to the world-shaking events of December 7, 1941, depicted with semi-documentary accuracy. The fiery spectacle is real, not computer-generated, and some of the stunts herein have never been topped. No love interest, a non-star…
FX-driven director Bert I. Gordon eschews his usual giant monsters for a more intimate ghost story set in a haunted lighthouse. Genre vet Richard Carlson returns to his noirish roots (Behind Locked Doors, The Amazing Mr.X) and distinguished d.p. Ernest Laszlo apparently shuttled between this second feature cheapie and the classy Inherit the Wind.
When top-billed Charlton Heston pushed for co-star Orson Welles to direct this late noir, nobody imagined it would emerge as one of the key works in the Welles canon despite being recut and partially reshot by Universal. His last Hollywood studio venture stacks up as probably Welles’ most popular picture although in 1958 it was dumped into…
In some respects a twisted remake of his own An American Dream, Tough Guys Don’t Dance proves that as a movie director, Norman Mailer was a great writer. Mailer’s unwieldy attitude behind the camera doesn’t stop this 1987 noir from being entertaining and it’s helped by John Bailey’s beautiful cinematography and Angelo Badalamenti’s dreamy score….
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we’ll need a drink to get through three of what our chief guru terms “tough sits,” films that are just plain hard to watch. The 2002 French art film, Irréversible,…
Bizarre art direction and FX work by the late Robert Burns (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Howling) helps make this one of the creepiest of the numerous low budget chillers ground out by producer Charles Band from the late 70s to date. Band’s filmography runs a close second to Roger Corman’s during this period. A favorite…
Irwin Allen followed up The Poseidon Adventure with another big budget disaster spectacle that gives the hotfoot to some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Hardly Paul Newman’s greatest achievement, but he approaches it with the same powerful presence he brought to all his films, and teams up effectively with fellow superstar Steve McQueen.
Ruben Östlund’s sardonic take on The Admirable Crichton is an explosive black comedy about a group of monied malcontents who meet pirates on the high seas before getting stranded on their own little island. Critics raved and awards were handed out including the Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Harris Dickinson and Charlbi…
“From the boiling rage of a world hurled back one million years comes….” Joan Crawford’s last movie. The indefatigable icon co-starred with filmdom’s biggest names but in the end her leading man was a troglodyte. There is probably a Hollywood lesson to be learned from this, but we don’t pretend to know what it is.
The Bard gets Troma-tized. The story’s the same, but Troma adds all the toilet humor, explicit sex scenes and gratuitous gore that old Will thoughtlessly left out of his version.
Jonathan Kaplan’s badass starring vehicle for musician Isaac Hayes is simply one of the all-time greatest blaxploitation movies, which came out near the end of the cycle and never garnered the reputation it deserves. Don’t tell us John Woo never saw the crazy hospital shoot-out at the end!
John Wayne finally landed an Oscar for his role as one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn in Henry Hathaway’s scenic blockbuster, which charmingly retains the archaic speech patterns of the source novel. Great supporting cast.
Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1982 actioner is an exploitation riff on 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game featuring a cast made in mondo heaven including Steve Railsback, Olivia Hussey and Michael Craig (Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island). Brian’s claims for the film as a satire can be borne out by its British release title, Blood Camp Thatcher, a back-handed salute to the…
Fans who saw this as children count this elaborate Jules Verne adaptation as one of their greatest movie experiences. Walt Disney’s first all-live-action production was a considerable gamble for his studio but became a huge hit and won Oscars for art direction and special effects. Disney won an Emmy for the hour-long making-of ABC TV…
Twice-Told Tales Blu-ray Kino Lorber 1963 / 1.66: 1 / 120 Min. Starring Vincent Price, Sebastian Cabot, Joyce Taylor Written by Robert E. Kent Directed by Sidney Salkow Released in October of 1963, the first review of Sidney Salkow’s Twice-Told Tales appeared in 1623: “Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale.” That line from…
After the boxoffice success of the Roger Corman Poe cycle it was inevitable that the concept would be co-opted, but since Vincent Price was exclusive to AIP for Poe material, quickie producer Robert Kent decided to tap the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne for a budget-minded ripoff of the Corman omnibus Tales of Terror. At an…
Lynch unleashed—kind of. Finally free of network constraints, the director took Twin Peaks, a surreal soap opera unexpectedly popular with Nielsen families, and turned it into a visionary big screen nightmare that had the opposite effect on moviegoers. Beloved characters like Agent Cooper were given short shrift in favor of some of Lynch’s most hallucinatory…
Well, Emma Thompson may not like Audrey Hepburn but we sure do. Here she is with Albert Finney in one of her best pictures, Stanley Donen’s time-shifting, audaciously fast-cut dramedy about the beginning and end of a marriage told through a series of car trips‚ around France. Here’s author Mark Harris on the lasting impact of…
Director Vincente Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas reunited‚ for this operatic non-sequel follow-up to their‚ caustic 1952 Hollywood saga The Bad and the Beautiful, now set ten years later in the La Dolce Vita movie world of Rome and based on a novel by Irwin Shaw. Some claim its protagonists are thinly veiled representations of…
Robert Aldrich’s brutal Cavalry vs Indians western is a Vietnam allegory that pulls no punches when it comes to violence. However, there seems to be no definitive version, since Aldrich and star Burt Lancaster each prepared different cuts of the film which were released domestically and abroad, and then recut again, often to eliminate horse…
A deep sea take on Alien, William Eubanks’ Underwater unleashes a Black Lagoon creature for the modern age. Kristen Stewart and Vincent Cassel are two sub-mariners who come face to snout with an enormous, many-toothed monster that director Eubanks based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft.
Perhaps too black a comedy for its era, Preston Sturges’ second effort after his departure from Paramount did not find much favor with audiences and effectively ended his career as an A-list Hollywood director. But subsequent years have proved kind to what was always a clever concept, originally conceived by Sturges in 1932 but summarily…
Powerhouse Indicator’s first foray into the Universal library yields six noir thrillers, all crime-related and all different: the list introduces us to scheming businessmen, venal confidence crooks, black-market racketeers, a femme fatale, a gangster deportee and baby stealers. The B&W features are enriched with some of the best actors of the postwar years, and the…