CineSavant
Two-Way Stretch
“Dodger” Lane, “Jelly” Knight and “Lennie the Dip” have been living large in Huntleigh Prison for several years; their Runyonesque nicknames all…
Articles by Charlie Largent
Blood of the Vines
Remembering Gene Hackman
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. …
CineSavant
Don’t Torture a Duckling
No, it's not about the secret life of Scrooge McDuck -- reviewer Charlie Largent takes the measure of Lucio Fulci's delirious giallo…
CineSavant
Blood and Lace
As discriminating in their appetites as an expert wine-taster, grindhouse audiences were a special breed of movie-goer: true connoisseurs of crap. Whether…
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Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles
A pretty cool cash-in combining the 60s monster-craze and Beatlemania, Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossibles shouldn’t work but it does; powered by…
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The Undead
Roger Corman began directing movies in 1955 and almost immediately his ambitions were at war with his budgets—films with apocalyptic titles like…
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Hatari!
Watching the animals of Hatari! in full flight is a politically incorrect thrill—though they’re running for their lives they have a majesty…
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Panic in Year Zero!
American-International built an exploitation empire on teens, horror, and science fiction—in 1962 they combined those cash cows into one 93 minute infomercial…
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The Beast with Five Fingers
Long before The Addams Family made disembodied hands a punchline there was The Beast with Five Fingers, W. F. Harvey’s short story…
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The Return of Doctor X
Directed by Vincent Sherman with a screenplay by Lee Katz, The Return of Doctor X stars Wayne Morris as Walter Garrett, a…
CineSavant
Top Cat – The Complete Series
In 1960, cartoon powerhouses William Hanna and Joseph Barbera found remarkable success with The Flintstones, a stone-age parody of Jackie Gleason’s kitchen…
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The Vampire/The Vampire’s Coffin
Early American horror films usually favored human monsters over the supernatural variety, and it wasn’t till the arrival of playful agitators like…
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Creature with the Blue Hand/Web of the Spider
More ticking time-bomb than actor, Klaus Kinski was born to prowl alleyways located a murder or two away from Berlin’s seediest strip…
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The Bat
Films produced in the silent era were triumphs of artistic ingenuity—though they lacked even the rudimentary tools of contemporary filmmaking, no Steadicam…
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Repo Man 4K
Repo Man is the work of a bartender with a metaphysical bent, conjuring up strange brews and even stranger stories. Alex Cox…
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The Ladykillers
British comedy has always depended on an understated quality, and nothing was as understated as their black comedies. From Kind Hearts and…
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The Lost Picture Show
A grungy mix of sex, violence, and mushroom clouds, Vinegar Syndrome‘s The Lost Picture Show is a radioactive slice of American cheese,…
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Mother Nature’s Monsters
Underestimate Bert I. Gordon at your peril, his movies stunk on ice but their influence was profound. The director began his reign…
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How Did They Ever Make A Movie of Lolita?
The headline was inescapable; “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” Thanks to the persistence of the Hollywood hype machine,…
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Macbeth
In 1948 Orson Welles went to toe to toe with fellow Shakespearean Laurence Olivier and it didn’t take long for critics to…
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Columbia Noir #6: The Whistler
A crime drama with a horror movie heart, The Whistler premiered on CBS Radio in May of 1942. Written and produced by…
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Republic Pictures Horror Collection
Founded by Herbert J. Yates in 1935, Republic Pictures was the Frankenstein monster of movie studios, pieced together from moribund entities like…
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Philo Vance Collection
Between 1928 and 1930, Paramount fast-tracked three films about a high society sleuth known as Philo Vance. The movies were based on…
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Dellamorte Dellamore
In I Bury the Living, one of the more eccentric horror films of the fifties, Richard Boone inherits a cemetery where the…
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Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors
Universal’s classic horror films were inspired by Victorian literature, Hammer Films was inspired by Universal, and Amicus Productions was inspired by Universal,…
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The Mask of Fu Manchu
The Mask of Fu Manchu is not so much a movie as an issue of Architectural Digest brought to life, a high-gloss…