Bring It On
Revenge is a dish best served cold and the recipe is given a distinctly Italian flavor by director Stelvio Massi in The Last Round (Italian title: Il Conto e Chiuso, 1976), a blue collar reworking of...
View ArticleHugo is No Dummy
What scares you? Circus clowns, graveyards at night, enclosed spaces, bats ? For me, ventriloquist dummies are the stuff of nightmares and some of my favorite spine-tinglers are Dead of Night, the 1945...
View ArticleMickey, Mickey, You’re So Fine, You Blow My Mind!
Forget about Boys Town, Judge Hardy and Son, Babes in Arm, The Human Comedy or National Velvet. This is the less traveled road of Mickey Rooney’s post-MGM career where anything goes like co-starring...
View ArticleLock Up Your Valuables!
Anyone who is familiar with Bollywood cinema knows that every film that is churned out by the Bollywood film industry contains musical numbers. That doesn’t mean they are all classified as musicals....
View ArticleThe Kaiju Eiga Man
When the subject of Japanese film comes up, you might assume that Akira Kurosawa is that nation’s most famous filmmaker in terms of international recognition and critical acclaim. Yet, a 2014 book by...
View ArticleThe Backward Life of Bedrich Frydrych
The cinematic concept of telling a story in reverse order might seem like a creative rejection of the traditional chronological narrative but it is nothing new. Polish filmmaker Jean Epstein...
View ArticleThe Reluctant Libertine
Hollywood’s penchant for remakes is not a new development but a strategy that has served some of our most acclaimed directors in often surprising and unique reworkings of the original source material....
View ArticleThe Beat Goes On
Hollywood has churned out countless musical biographies on popular musicians, singers and songwriters over the years, jazz artists and their life stories have remained a virtually untapped genre with...
View Article…And You Thought Donald Pleasence Was Creepy?
Angela Pleasence, like her father, has a face made for the cinema though not in the realm of conventional leading ladies. Even as a young actress appearing in bit parts in movies like Here We Go Around...
View ArticleRobert Bresson’s Parisian Reverie
One wouldn’t normally associate Robert Bresson with such rapturously romantic, Paris-based films as Ninotchka, An American in Paris, Funny Face, Gigi, and Love in the Afternoon yet Four Nights of a...
View ArticleTruckers on Speed
“The Pill Dragnet! Blasting the Blackest Market of all…the girl peddlers of the deadliest thrill for sale!” – one of the taglines for Death in Small Doses (1957). In the grand tradition of other...
View ArticleA Concert Pianist’s Worst Nightmare
What is the worst thing that could happen to a celebrated world class pianist? It would have to be something that destroyed his famous hands, wouldn’t it? The Hands of Orlac, based on a novel by...
View ArticleHaving a Wild Weekend
In the late sixties there were a number of sun-drenched erotic romps from Italy filmed in picturesque settings around the Mediterranean such as Giuliano Biagetti’s Interrabang (1969) and Ottavio...
View ArticleThe New Orleans Streetfighter
If you have never been tempted to see Charles Bronson in one of his many top-billed action vehicles, then you also probably wonder why he enjoyed superstar status on an international level. But put...
View ArticleLife is a Carnival
Most Japanese film fans and cult movie buffs are certainly familiar with maverick director Seijun Suzuki for his ultra-stylish and unconventional yakuza thrillers Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to...
View ArticleDeadpan Lunacy
Amid the avalanche of overproduced and overmarketed films that flooded movie theaters in the summer of 2006 (Poseidon, Miami Vice, Lady in the Water and Snakes on a Plane to name a few), a gallic...
View ArticleDestination: Ferness, Scotland
First of all, there is no Ferness, Scotland. It is a fictitious seaside town created by writer/director Bill Forsyth for his 1983 film, Local Hero. It is also a place that lives on the hearts and minds...
View ArticleThese Violent Delights Have Violent Ends
The William Shakespeare tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, has served as the inspiration for countless movies about star-crossed lovers such as Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953), West Side Story (1961) and the...
View ArticleHigh on Adrenalin
Married news reporters Bob Tur and Marika Gerrard are probably not familiar to most people but over a 15-year period from the early 1980s to the late 1990s they covered news events from their...
View ArticleI Was a Teenage Peeping Tom
Among the many teen idols of the fifties who climbed to fame with top forty hit records, only a few made the successful crossover to film acting. Pat Boone was groomed by 20th-Century-Fox as a teen...
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