William Castle sure loved a gimmick.  His best movies were often accompanied by ones like the buzzers under seats for select screenings of The Tingler.  For 1963’s 13 Frightened Girls, attendees were given a card to lick which revealed the phrase “Don’t get caught in the candy web”.  Yeah, that’s what I want to do […]

Columbia Pictures was the most minor of the major studios, but it might have been the best one for noirs, if only because it churned out so many of them.  While it rarely knocked any out of the park, their batting average for the genre was better than the larger studios. Consider 1955’s The Crooked […]

I am happy not being an alpha male, the kind of person who says things like the view never changing unless you’re the lead dog.  Then there’s the thing about staying on the porch if one cannot keep up with the big dogs.  You know there’s something wrong with a way of living if so […]

Glenn Ford is in a pickle, driving down a steep, winding mountain road and in a truck without functioning brakes.  The emergency brake is out as well, and this is definitely an emergency.  By the time he gets to the town at the base of the mountain, he’s going full bore.  It is astonishing he […]

In movie circles, there is ongoing debate as to whether 1929’s The Taming of the Shrew ever contained in its credits this curious attribution: “by William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”.  1976’s The Food of the Gods says it is the work of H.G. Wells, but writer and director Bert I. Gordon is […]

The alure of true crime eludes me.  At the present time, it thrives in podcasts about serial killings solved and unsolved.  In the first noir age, you had magazines like Detective and movies such as 1955’s Cell 2455, Death Row. The picture is based on the memoir of Caryl Chessman, who was waiting on California’s […]

The dialogue in David Mamet’s best work has a certain rhythm to it.  Few actors deliver such lines as brilliantly as Joe Mantegna.  There is almost a musical quality to his line deliveries.  He stars with Don Ameche in the second picture Mamet directed, and that is 1988’s Things Change.  I thought I had seen […]

I refuse to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s because I was so appalled by Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance of it as a deeply offensive portrayal of a Japanese man.  Both Rooney and director Blake Edwards went on to later express regret, but I still will not be watching the rest of the picture beyond the actor’s […]

The concept of the political fixer is something I find unnerving, and the people in that role are generally creepy.  Consider Roy Cohn, a terrible person who was Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the House Committee hearings to week out Communists.  It seems to take a certain kind of person to gather and retain great […]

The early 60’s must have been a strange time.  The movie studios, at least, seemed to be confused.  Hitchcock’s Psycho suddenly made the campy, gimmick-laden horrors of William Castle look positively quaint in comparison.  At the same time, there were so many absent-minded and nutty professors on the screen.  Castle decided to step out of […]

Most people would assume that, if a train could talk, it would say, “I think I can…I think I can…”, but the train in 1949’s The Undercover Man goes “How about your wife?  How about your wife?”, at least in Glenn Ford’s head, per a looped threat said in the voice of mob lawyer Barry […]

I have a title ready if anybody ever decides to make a second movie about a deadly dessert that consumes the consumer, and that is Terrormisu: The Dessert Which Eats You.  Not that this is any better than the title of a movie where that is exactly what happens, that being 1985’s The Stuff.  Looking […]

Somebody I know once watched an ant carrying an impossibly large cake crumb.  This person was very impressed and wondered aloud how much honey the ants in the hive might make from that.  After a pause, the rest of us broke out in hysterical laughter, though it is easy to make the logical fallacy that […]

If one didn’t know in advance 1957’s The Tarnished Angels was from a Faulker novel, the turgid dialogue might clue in a person.  An example: “I could tell you an idyll of winged knights jousting with death, if I felt you could smell a story the way you smell whiskey.”  Huh? This is from Rock […]

A good friend of mine lost a considerable amount of weight by reducing their sodium intake.  That is difficult to do in the present age, where there is so much of the mineral in every product.  Before seeing 1954’s Bait, I never considered a complete lack of it could possibly be detrimental to one’s health.  […]