As we learned from a legendary Monty Python sketch, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.  I especially wouldn’t expect it in Italy, but yet there’s the mysterious red-hooded and black-cloaked figure in 1972’s The Devil’s Lover.  At least, it sure looks like an Inquisitor.  Instead, it is only the devil (Edmund Purdom) dressed as one—so, somebody […]

While watching 1968’s The Shakiest Gun in the West, I couldn’t stop thinking about The Avalanches’s song “Frontier Psychiatrist”.  It is a track made of all kinds of crazy samples, including one I’ve always wondered the source of, where a guy is saying, “and he made false teeth”.  Don Knotts may not be a psychiatrist […]

When my father-in-law died, his eulogy included a mention of his cat Fang, which was short for “fangool”.  There were ripples of laughter in the crowd of mourners, as many were in the know that this is Italian for “fuck you”. The only time I can recall hearing the word in a film is 1974’s […]

I find it odd I wasn’t weirded out by Robert Newton keeping Phil Brown chained for weeks on end in an abandoned building.  What I did find unnerving was the white line on the floor he had put down in advance, making the farthest Brown can reach.  Not exactly sure why, but I was reminded […]

Parental expectations can be a cruel thing.  Just look at WWI war veteran Arthur O’Connell and how he treats his son Don Knotts.  His rearing of Knotts was apparently militaristic in nature, with him being literally marched around the house at his father’s command.  Then he sends in an application to NASA for Knotts to […]

The forbidden film arrived in the mail years after buying it.  The unlabeled, burned blu-ray arrived in a paper sleeve.  I felt unclean just owning this, as if I was part of a tape trading community for some horrific form of pornography. It seems surreal to me one can walk into a Barnes & Noble […]

1974’s Sugar Hill is a weird beast, a hybrid of zombie, gangster and Blaxploitation genres.  It is truly number one in a field of one. Marki Bey stars as the title character.  She’s hellbent on revenge for the murder of husband Larry Don Johnson, emphasis on “hell”.  With the assistance of an old voodoo woman […]

I first cottoned to the work of David Lynch through his Blue Velvet, just a little before Twin Peaks became a sensation.  I even have a weird association with his Eraserhead, as I accidentally burned microwave popcorn the first time I saw it, so I now smell that if I so much as think about […]

I used to sneer at light entertainment, thinking “harmless” was an adjective one should only use in the pejorative.  Live long enough, and the harsh realities of the world tend to make one have a greater appreciation of fare one might describe in that way. 1966’s The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is the textbook example […]

The Atari 2600 had some gloriously batshit titles.  For example, there was Communist Mutants from Outer Space, which is actually an incredibly solid game, almost in spite of the silly name. 2011 found footage sci-fi horror film Apollo 18, has aliens that can disguise themselves as rocks destroy our flag.  And this is near a […]