Worlds collide in this 1940 musical-comedy-horror film directed by David Butler (a Hollywood vet best known for breezy low-budget fare like Road to Morocco) but it’s up to the audience to decide who’s scarier… co-stars Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi or bandleader Kay Kyser and his Kollege of Musical Knowledge. To their credit Karloff and crew retain…
Mark Chao stars as the monster-hunting detective Dee Renjie in Tsui Hark’s extravagant fantasy with enough creature-feature action for a Ray Harryhausen film. It’s a prequel to Hark’s widely acclaimed 2010 epic, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame.
Mel Brooks’ affectionate comic homage to the Universal Frankenstein movies piles on every cliche and cartoony plot twist from the first five series entries, with appropriate attention paid to the original art direction and camera setups. When Columbia balked at the budget and black and white photography, Brooks took it to 20th Century Fox. A…
Delmer Daves directed this glossy soap opera about the rise and fall of a truck driver turned best-selling novelist. James Franciscus plays Youngblood Hawke, the country boy spoiled by too much, too soon, and Susanne Pleshette plays his lovestruck book editor. Loosely based on the life of Thomas Wolfe (probably the reason for the extra…
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1966 comedy about a love-starved nebbish boasts a daunting cast, including Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, and Rip Torn. Peter Kastner plays the teenager kicked out of the nest by his gruff father—fortunately (or not) he falls right into the arms of the ethereal Elizabeth Hartman. A bittersweet film if ever there was,…
Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English language film, Blow-Up, was a surprise worldwide hit for MGM which permitted him to follow it up with a big-scale X-rated art film set in America. In production for over two years, it tanked big time, grossing less an $1 million on a $7 million investment and drawing withering reviews. Time…
Here I finally present It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point, a feature-length essay film that began as an editing mashup, a bit o’ fun with found footage, and ended as a pop meditation on American iconography and mythologies, a cine-exegesis of the American desert through the prism of both culture and counterculture, and a very…
John Boorman proves that with Sean Connery as your star, you can make any movie you want—that movie is Zardoz and it must be seen to be disbelieved. An airborne statue whose stony grimace dominates a futuristic hellscape, Zardoz is a memorably bizarre figurehead of the authoritarian future. But as the space-age anti-hero named Zed,…
Pupi Avati’s 1983 zombie thriller Zeder features old-fashioned storytelling and new-fashioned gore along with a little sci-fi and some psychic shenanigans. Also known as Revenge of the Dead, the movie reanimates a classic horror movie trope: a mysterious scientist’s efforts to revive the dead lead to predictable disaster.
Originally promoted as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, this is also known as Zombie 2(!), Zombie Flesh Eaters and numerous other titles. It’s sort of a Trailers from Hell milestone–our first Lucio Fuci trailer! And who better to dissect it than the director of Hellboy?
Producer Stanley Baker stars in Cy Endfield’s epic recreation of the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift, in which 1000 stiff-upper-lip British soldiers gave a good account of themselves in a battle with 4000 Zulu warriors. Not scrupulously accurate, but rousing and excitingly staged, with a great John Barry score.
Cy Endfield, who directed 1964’s Zulu, wrote the book and screenplay for this 1979 prequel helmed by Douglas Hickox. It’s a similarly sprawling epic featuring even more Hollywood heavyweights including Burt Lancaster, Peter O’Toole, John Mills, and Bob Hoskins in a small role. Despite all the firepower—on the battlefield and in the cast list—the film…