“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…
Viva Elvis! Viva Ann Margret! That’s all there is to this one, but it’s been enough to sustain it as a fan favorite for nearly 50 years!
A truly odd take on The Stepford Wives with a nod to Patrick McGoohan’s Orwellian mind game The Prisoner, Lorcan Finnegan’s 2019 science fiction film is a mix of horror, paranoia and sardonic humor about the travails of suburban life. Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg play the unfortunate couple searching for their dream home only…
70 minutes of prime Meyer madness–sort of Russ’s version of Shock Corridor– tackling sex, race, the war in Vietnam, etc. Its towering $6 million profit on a $76,000 investment landed him a studio deal with 20th Century-Fox which resulted in the trash classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and petered out with the barely…
Directed by Konstantin Yershov, renowned filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko did the special effects for this sinister fairy tale about a vengeful witch who won’t stay dead. Based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 story, Natalya Varley plays the restless sorceress and Leonid Kuravlyov is the terrified student who wishes he’d stayed in bed. Varley bears more than a…
Two frenchwomen, played by Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin, go for a weekend outing and share stories about their past sexual escapades. The 1980 film, directed by Michel Deville, is most notable for its episodic flashback structure, derived from 15 different anecdotes by 15 different writers. With films like Le Lectrice (starring Miou-Miou), Deville found…
Jindrich Polak’s 1963 Czechslovakian space odyssey was originally titled Ikaria XB-1, the name of the spaceship on a mission to search for life in the stars of Alpha Centuri. Adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Magellenic Cloud, this austere and beautifully designed pic anticipates Tarkovsky’s Solaris and remains one of the best of the Eastern…
Celebrated cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s solo directorial debut is a haunting, transfixing tone poem about two children lost in the Australian outback and their relationship with a young aborigine on his coming-of-age “walkabout”. Roeg improvised much of the film from Edward Bond’s 14-page screenplay, based on a popular young adult novel. The first screen role of…
Is there a more‚ overlooked coming of age movie than this‚ little-seen Bronx-set drama from novelist Richard Price and director Phil Kaufman? Much like The Wild Bunch, these 1963 gang members find themselves on the road to oblivion in a changing society. Josh Olson brings this one back out into the sunlight.
Although it played mostly second feature dates, this‚ acclaimed Korean war‚ indie by the Sanders brothers (who began as second-unit directors on The Night of the Hunter) took home many kudos from international fim festivals.John Saxon is memorable in the lead as a soldier turned serial killer.‚ This‚ marked the beginning of a fruitful relationship…
George Pal’s pioneering H.G. Wells adaptation updates the action to 1953 Los Angeles, with Oscar-winning state-of-the-art visual FX and sound effects so great they’re still in use today.
One of Sergio Leone’s favorites, with Henry Fonda in a virtual dress rehearsal for his triumphant cold-blooded killer role in Once Upon a Time in the West. Fonda introduces the trailer for Edward Dmytryk’s unjustly neglected existential western, based on a novel drawn from the career of Wyatt Earp.
To commemorate the 7th anniversary of the Watts riots, Stax Records produced a soulful extravaganza bringing together many of their own acts including The Staple Singers, Albert King, and Issac Hayes as the headliner. Mel Stuart directed the film of the day-long event with Richard Pryor serving as the unofficial host. Three soundtrack albums were…
Often cited (by Stan Laurel himself) as a quintessential Laurel and Hardy vehicle, this modest western spoof showcases their gently abusive relationship with a minimum of dialog. The music score by Marvin Hatley was Oscar nominated! Although the team remains popular with the baby boomer generation, present day kids are woefully unfamiliar with L & H. Hopefully the affectionate new…
Fritz Leiber’s pulp novella “Conjure Wife”, which originally appeared in the April 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds, has had a surprisingly durable screen history. It was adapted here as the second entry in Universal’s Inner Sanctum Mystery series, then redone years later as an episode of the Moment of Fear TV show (1960). A classy…
A bitter ex-con employs a most, er, unusual weapon to knock off his enemies. Jamaa Fanaka’s UCLA student project is one of the rare such films to receive wide theatrical distribution (from drive-in kings Crown-International Pictures). Avoid the heavily cut reissue version titled Soul Vengeance.
In 1976 Robert Altman’s unofficial protégé Alan Rudolph directed this knowing dissection of Angelenos with an appropriately Altmanesque cast including Keith Carradine (in a near reprisal of his womanizing turn in Nashville), Sally Kellerman and Sissy Spacek (whose break-out role as Carrie was the same year). Rudolph, having punctuated his long and admirable directing career with…