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…
The script for Sebastian Schipper’s film was 12 pages long allowing most of the dialogue to be improvised in this 138 minute German film shot in one continuous take. Russian Ark followed a similar path but was essentially a dreamy documentary about St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace – Schipper’s film follows a more conventional narrative arc in…
Is nothing sacred? The just-announced remake of David Cronenberg’s bizarre and prescient sci-fi classic is unlikely to recapture the innovative impact of the original despite the technological update. A uniquely creepy and thought-provoking movie, the making of which is chronicled in Tim Lucas’s book Videodrome from Centipede Press. Long Live the New Flesh!
One of the best historical spectacles of the period, this 1958 adventure provided the template for every subsequent Norse saga. Lots of violent fun, ripe acting and striking location shooting makes this Richard Fleischer epic one of the most popular Viking movies ever.
A “sleeper” is a box office success that comes out of nowhere. And no one expected this modest 1960 British import, based on John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckoos”, to catch the attention of a worldwide audience and inspire its own (some think even better) sequel. The glowing eyes effect on the alien children was not…
An amorphous mass of electrical energy is on an outer space prowl in John Bruno’s 1999 science-fiction thriller derived from the comic book of the same name. Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland are just three of the unlucky crew members destined to fight off a squadron of robots possessed by the deep…
Directed by visual effects artist John Bruno, 1999’s Virus is a seafaring science fiction thriller about a Russian research ship beset by alien cyborgs looking to use humans as “spare parts.” Some of those parts belong to stars Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland as a tugboat captain. A line of action figures and…
Produced in 1980, Kinji Fukasaku’s apocalyptic downer peers into the distant future of 1982 to imagine a virus wiping out the earth’s population. A number of civilians and military stationed in Antarctica survive—the plague can’t operate in cold temperatures. Fukasaku’s movie boasts a cast worthy of an Irwin Allen disaster movie, toplined by Sonny Chiba,…
A vanity production along the lines of All That Jazz and Purple Rain, Evel Knievel eschews the pseudonyms employed by Prince and Bob Fosse and just plays himself, a vainglorious stuntman who took the phrase “daredevil” literally. Veteran director Gordon Douglas keeps a tight rein on the action, helped considerably by a supporting cast including…
Having been portrayed by George Hamilton in a 1971 biopic, motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel took on the fictionalized role of his own life in this surprisingly well made actioner, the last film directed by the prolific Gordon Douglas. Produced by an uncredited Irwin Allen, it boasts a surprisingly strong cast and production values. Knievel’s life…