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…
Two men, director Irvin Kershner (eight years before The Empire Strikes Back), and screenwriter Paul Zinder, were behind this bracing feminist manifesto disguised as a screwball comedy. Barbra Streisand, playing a woman in mid-pregnancy crisis, is haunted (and sometimes entertained) by a series of bizarre fantasies that are eye-opening in more ways than one. Backed…
Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece gives the lie to the term “spaghetti western.” In a hastily shortened version it was a box-office disappointment in the U.S. but it played in the same theater in Paris for years. The cast is one for the ages. Henry Fonda, playing one of the great villains in movie history, Jason…
Call it metaphysical science fiction or whatever you’d like but this provocative 2013 film from the fiercely independent director Shane Carruth is like no other movie (though it does echo the impressionistic mood swings of Terrence Malick and David Lynch). It drew critical raves upon its premiere at Sundance and continues to spark controversy to…
The first word people use to describe Akihiro Higuchi’s Uzumaki is “twisted”—appropriate for a horror film in which an obsession with spirals overtakes a small town with surreal consequences. Higuchi, better known as “Higuchinsky”, based his film on a popular manga written by Junji Ito in 1998 which spawned two successful video games. An animated…
A financial and critical flop, this notoriously inaccurate version of the rise and fall of silent screen star Rudolf Valentino is the one picture Ken Russell said he regretted making (“What idiot made this?”). He called the decision to make it his worst mistake and its costly failure impacted his career for years. Seems in…
Jaromil Jires’ ethereal Czechoslovakian combo fairy tale/medieval horror fantasy makes up in ravishing imagery what it lacks in story. A surreal amalgam of vampires, incest, polysexual eroticism, anti-clerical jibes and dreams within dreams. Not for everyone, but unique and mesmerizing, with a growing cult following. Criterion is streaming their transfer of Valerie on Hulu plus. You…
Jacqueline Susann’s mega-best-seller became a popular kitchfest in the hands of director Mark Robson and writer Helen Deutsch. Pill-popping, bed-hopping starlets meet various gloomy tinseltown fates in one of the enduring camp classics of the late sixties. Uncredited among the screenwriters is the one who did the initial adaptation, Harlan Ellison!
Martha Coolidge’s directorial debut introduced the local phenomenon of ValleySpeak to an unbelieving world. An early exemplar of the let-the-song-score tell the story, it features a panoply of period bands, but not all those listed in the credits can actually be heard in the film today. Due to music rights problems, songs by The Clash,…
Ray Harryhausen makes good on a concept conceived decades earlier by his mentor Willis O’Brien, the genius behind Kong. Echoes of Mighty Joe Young hover over this shot-in-Spain cowboys vs. dinosaurs extravaganza which, despite a spirited ad campaign, failed to catch on at the boxoffice. Stirring music score by Jerome Maross.
During the 50s and 60s the continuous boxoffice success of such big budget Jules Verne adaptations as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth led to a number of low rent Verne ripoffs, few more impoverished than this ridiculous quickie from the Columbia Pictures B-unit, an early pioneer in…
The first coproduction between England’s Hammer Films and American International Pictures is an appropriately lurid affair, with many heaving bosoms showing the telltale marks of Carmilla, the lesbian vampire. Not as arty as Roger Vadim’s superior Blood and Roses, this was a big enough hit in 1970 to spawn two pulchritudinous follow-ups, Lust for a…
Dodge Challenger sales spiked when this existential road trip hit the screen in 1971. Symbolism abounds but there’s a gonzo rebel tone that makes this car chase extravaganza one of the cooler pix of the era, and one that defines the term Cult Classic. Charlotte Rampling’s cameo as an Angel of Death was cut before…
With echoes of Brian De Palma’s The Phantom of the Paradise, Todd Haynes’s glitzy musical from 1998 centers around Brian Slade, an enigmatic glam rocker who fakes his own death. Loaded with original songs (because Bowie refused to lend his own), the cast is filled with terrific actors including Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale, Eddie Izzard,…
Notable for its great cast of functioning alcoholics, this British-made kidnap thriller deserves a better rep than it’s got. Plenty of suspense and some swell shocks make it well worth checking out.
The seeds of many a Euro Western were sown by this Robert Aldrich classic. Produced by co-star Burt Lancaster, who’s seen here in all his most blinding toothiness. Plenty of well-staged action and a great supporting cast make this one a fan favorite.
Once again Samuel Fuller uses the skimpiest of budgets as a tool to contrast reality with artifice. A long cherished project for the director, this German-set postwar drama was the last RKO picture, and has been out of circulation for years until its recent Warner Archive DVD release.
“Hitchcock’s masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us”. That was critic Robin Wood’s astute 1968 evaluation ten years after Alfred Hitchcock’s final collaboration with James Stewart had been released to indifferent box office and unappreciative reviews. Tragic, obsessive and backed by…