1970’s The Man Who Haunted Himself is weirdly prescient in regard to a single line.  Roger Moore, still three years away from his debut as Bond, says of corporate espionage that there are more forms of espionage in form alone than what is in the Bond movies.  Here, Moore is an executive of the type […]

The old blues song “Motherless Children” rattles off one family member after another who can’t properly fill the void left when a mother dies.  1950 noir Gun Crazy shows us something the song fails to mention and that is, while an older sister tries to do the best she can, she can’t keep a kid […]

1955 noir Crashout opens with a prison escape, a staple of the genre.  The first shot is of prisoners stampeding towards the camera.  Then we cut to a shot over the fortification in the other direction, where prisoners have somehow gone through the wall and are now outside the facility.  We are not shown how […]

Susan Tyrrell must have led an interesting life.  Being Oscar nominated for Best Actress for 1972’s Fat City didn’t dissuade her from going on to do Andy Warhol’s Bad or playing Queen Doris in Richard Elfman’s deeply weird Forbidden Zone.  In 1981, she starred with Jimmy McNichol in the off-beat horror film Butcher, Baker, Nightmare […]

I wonder if anybody excited to see 1978’s Gray Lady Down thought they were about to watch a geriatric take on Deep Throat?  Instead, it is a sub that is the “gray lady” that goes “down” after a collision with another vessel. This is the kind of film where the captain of that sub is […]

Jaws spawned so many bad imitators, but 1977’s Orca: The Killer Whale might have the most unusual crew.  The S.S. Bumpo (no, really) is captained by Richard Harris (who I will always first associate with the horrible song “MacArthur Park”), with Keenan Wynn as his second (and I will always associate him with Dr. Strangelove) […]

You might think Fingerman is an obscure Marvel superhero, but you’d be wrong.  The first indicator is because this is a film noir from 1955. The film starts with the obligatory narrator, as Frank Lovejoy says, “My name…let’s just say it’s Casey Martin”.  Not sure why he acts like he’s using an alias as we’re […]

Pre-code horror is always a special thing, especially since it was such a brief period.  That timeframe was from roughly the advent of sound cinema at the tail end of the 1920’s, through to 1935, when the Production Code went into effect and essentially neutered the movies. Universal’s 1932 take on Murders in the Rue […]

1985’s Trouble in Mind is a critically-praised 1985 neo-noir recently issued as a limited-run blu-ray from Shout Factory.  Ebert gave it his highest rating.  The description on the Shout site has little information.  I only wish they put the full text from the back of the case on their listing.  Consider: “Littered with gangsters and […]

I love the movie Cabin Boy and it is partly because of the weird sub-genre of cinema it lovingly parodies.  The 1954 Disney version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is very likely one of those inspirations.  It has a large creature; albeit, a giant squid and not a giant store manager.  It […]

The past few years have seen polling workers and the vote tabulation process subjected to extreme scrutiny, with officials and even low-level workers facing intimidation and death threats.  In 2008’s Swing Vote, young teen Madeline Carroll is so upset deadbeat dad Kevin Costner has failed to show up at the polling station, that she forges […]

When you find yourself in cheap motel room, heavily armed and with the windows obscured with cardboard and duck-tape, you know you have made some questionable life choices.  This is the scenario Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton find themselves in at the beginning of 2016’s Midnight Special.  This is just one of a series of […]

It had only been a year since King Kong, and so that film’s star is second-billed in 1934’s Black Moon.  I find that odd, since Fay Wray is a tertiary character in this, at best.  Curiously it is third-billed Dorothy Burgess who is the true star here. This is a high society woman who was […]

I have enjoyed a great deal of neo-noir, and most such films are at least partly staged in the desert.  The entirety of 2015’s The Frontier rarely loses sight of the titular diner and conjoined motel, which is in an area so desolate there are no other proximate structures.  It’s a good place to have […]

CGI is rarely convincing to me, but the alien at the center of 2020’s Sputnik is almost good enough to make me forget its DNA is all ones and zeroes.  This was even more of a surprise to me, as this is a Russian film, which I assume means less money went into it than […]