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…

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 box office 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 rip-offs, few more impoverished than this ridiculous quickie from the Columbia Pictures B-unit, an early pioneer in recycling….

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…