Guy Trosper, Anthony Mann and John Alton’s western is shocking stuff for 1950 — Hollywood did address the historical raw deal handed Native Americans, way before the activist ’70s. Robert Taylor is a Shoshone rancher in Wyoming, who comes back from the Civil War with medals and finds that opportunists are passing laws that dispossess…
This one played like gangbusters in the theater. The only negative flak we heard came from a) people that don’t like Sandra Bullock no matter what she’s in, and b) people that violently deny the premise that space garbage poses a potential threat. The thrills in this presumed 99 & 44/100% CGI space thriller just…
La Vampire Nue, Les Démoniaques Blu-ray – All Region Powerhouse Indicator 1968, 1974 Starring Christine François, Joëlle Coeur, John Rico Written by Jean Rollin, Serge Moati Photographed by Jean-Jacques Renon Directed by Jean Rollin Which came first, the art of Philippe Druillet or the films of Jean Rollin? There’s an easy answer; Druillet began his…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, we pair wines with three different takes on the Mutiny on the Bounty story. Each of the trailers has commentary from Larry Karaszewski, who co-wrote Ed Wood, The People vs….
UK correspondent Lee Broughton returns with coverage of an original and engaging British folk horror film. Director Elliot Goldner’s found footage show was released to little fanfare in 2013 but those curious film fans who subsequently picked it up as a speculative cheap buy on DVD or caught it on TV came away pleasantly surprised….
Milestone films and the Criterion Collection team together for this 1964 epic, a a joint Cuban-Soviet super-travelogue celebration of the revolutionary spirit. Four vignettes from the pre-Castro years spell out the glory of anti-imperialism, using fancy visuals and gravity-defying camerawork. The cultural experiment was judged a failure and shelved for decades, until it was rediscovered…
Ignore the exploitative original posters … this thriller from 1983 is a clear-eyed view of America’s gun problem, expressed, wouldn’t you know it, by an Englishman. Filmmaker Tony Garnett formats his show like a vigilante shocker, but the real subject is a culture gone awry. Karen Young makes a star-caliber debut as a Boston schoolteacher…
Anthony Mann’s high-quality conventional western has top stars Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins, plus good input from Neville Brand, John McIntire and especially Betsy Palmer. Perkins takes lessons in how to be Marshall Dillon, while the womenfolk fuss and slimy Lee Van Cleef shoots nice people in the back. We get a Cold War lesson…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, a trio of films directed by Fritz Lang. We have a wine to pour with each of them. In my younger days, oh so long ago, I would occasionally have…
Nancy Savoca belongs in the top rank of creative filmmakers of the 1990s. This unorthodox telling of a ‘neighborhood miracle’ may be her most ambitious and original work. TV comedienne Tracey Ullman surprised everyone with her unusual characterization, but Lili Taylor stole the show with the most compelling depiction ever of someone enraptured by faith…
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Severin Films 1981 Starring Susan Tyrrell, Bo Svenson, Jimmy McNichol Written by Stephen Breimer, Boon Collins Photographed by Robbie Greenberg Directed by William Asher As the love-starved auntie with romantic designs on her teenage nephew, Susan Tyrrell delivers a primal scream performance that would send the…
Family-friendly Steven Spielberg once again seeks out the sentimental corner of sci-fi, with memorable roles for his lovable cast and a technical workout for his visual effects experts. Cute flying saucers behave like storybook elves, to make magic for elderly evictees (Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy). The writers in this refreshingly warm-hearted show would later specialize…
This Poverty Row PRC opus was thrown together in just a few weeks, in the first months of World War II. Cult actress Anna May Wong gets top billing in a pro-China thriller about keeping the Burma Road open, an issue that would later become a real wartime strategy. We’re also drawn to anything by…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we’ll need a drink to get through three of what our chief guru terms “tough sits,” films that are just plain hard to watch. The 2002 French art film, Irréversible,…
Tormented Blu-ray Film Masters 1960 Starring Richard Carlson, Juli Reding, Susan Gordon Written by Bert I. Gordon, George Worthing Yates Photographed by Ernest Laszlo Directed by Bert I. Gordon As a man bedeviled by the ghost of his jilted lover, Richard Carlson is feeling Tormented, and after a few minutes of this waterlogged spook show,…
Swing back with us to 1958, when all three TV networks were crammed with westerns, each of which needed a gimmick. Wayde Preston IS Chris Colt, a secret agent who takes on various bad guys every week, pretending to be an ordinary traveling gun salesman. The three seasons are jammed with favorite actors and actresses…
The Scarface Mob Blu-ray Arrow 1962 Starring Robert Stack, Walter Winchell, Neville Brand Written by Paul Monash Photographed by Charles Straumer Directed by Phil Karlson The Great Depression made the high-rolling mobsters of the movies seem all the more glamorous; audiences not only sympathized with those sharp-dressed devils, they dreamed about trading places. Even a…
It’s what a real movie marquee might have offered in the second half of the 1920s. Disc producers Jon C. Mirsalis and Ben Model give us four ‘rescued’ attractions, which include a western, a soap opera, a zany comedy with bathing beauties, and a jungle adventure featuring a woman raised by a gorilla. Each was…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we pair wines with movies that may have fallen through the cracks. You can see them if you squint really hard and shine a flashlight down in there. Hey, didn’t…
John Ford’s outlaw trio rescues an orphaned baby, evoking the sentimental innocence of silent-era westerns. With John Wayne, Ward Bond and Pedro Armendáriz on board, and photographed in blazing Technicolor by Winton Hoch, little else is needed to wow Ford fans. Plus hymns, home cooking, genuine Death Valley locations and a Christmas miracle. It’s a…
Pegged as a slasher-type horror, Simon Wincer’s drama hews closer to the emerging ‘artful’ trend in Australian filmmaking — with some of the bigger names associated with fancier exploitation fare, too: Everett De Roche, Brian May. Chantal Contouri gets top billing but the film is carried away by the magnetic Sigrid Thornton, who would later…
Warners star power triumphs in a patched-together screen classic about the hard life of truckers on the road — that turns into a murder ‘n’ madness melodrama. It’s a special picture in terms of career advancement for Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. The somewhat sexist dialogue feels edgy for 1940, and Ann Sheridan is at…
It was slick, glamorous, sexy — the cable series tickled TV viewers with fantasies of Wall Street wealth and power, adding extra fun with a gate-crashing imposter and his photographic memory. This is how the one percenters wished they lived: beautiful people in killer fashions, in a law firm that settles most disputes out of…
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week we celebrate Roger Corman’s birthday with wines for three of his films. April 5th has special significance beyond the fact that it sits roughly halfway between my birthday and tax…
The Panther Women – The Batwoman Blu-ray Powerhouse Indicator 1967/1968 Starring Maura Monti, Ariadne Welter, Elizabeth Campbell Written by Alfredo Salazar Photographed by Agustín Jiménez Directed by René Cardona A garden of unearthly delights, Famous Monsters of Filmland was the Cahiers du Cinéma for middle-school monster fans. But 1964’s July issue opened up a different…