I was determined to avoid the news on the night of the presidential election of November 2024, and not check the results until after I awoke the next morning.  But I needed a distraction that night, and so I watched the 1946 Marx Brothers film A Night in Casablanca. No points for guessing where the […]

Diana Dors was a sex symbol with whom the UK was obsessed in the 1950’s, where she was often referred to as the British Marilyn Monroe, a comparison that does a disservice to both women.  I mostly know her from horror anthology films from roughly two decades later when her appearance was…well, not exactly the […]

If bronze statues are so hard to make look like the intended subject, why do people keeping making them?  As I write this, NBA star Dwayne Wade has been immortalized in that form, and the finished product looks uncannily closer to Kelsey Grammer. A similarly daft statue is unveiled at the research facility at the […]

You should be wary of people who are interested in clock towers, especially those on college campuses.  One notorious example is 1966 sniper Charles Whitman, who committed his spree from the University of Texas’s clock tower.  1989’s Big Man on Campus is horrific but for entirely different reasons, as it has a hunchback who has […]

1974’s Evil of Dracula is the last entry of Michio Yamamoto’s trilogy of Japanese gothic vampire films.  I could probably copy and paste much of what I wrote about the previous two and save myself some time. Once again, this is a film solidly in the European gothic style, having some degree of novelty just […]

Despite having a couple of years of Japanese language instruction, I have retained extremely little of it today.  With that, I am always pleasantly surprised by how many words in my limited vocabulary I recognized in 1971’s Lake of Dracula.  Simple things like “daijobu” (I’m OK) or “wakarimashta” (I understood).  This might be a good […]

When I discovered there was a blu-ray set with a trilogy of Japanese gothic vampire films, I knew I had to check this out.  While that country has a long, rich history of ghost stories, I was wondering what their spin on the European gothic tradition might be like.  Short answer: it is an odd […]

There are some movies which, for one reason or another, are truly one-of-a-kind and of the likes we will never see again.  One such picture is the justifiably legendary Freaks.  This 1932 movie stars a variety of attractions from real-life freak shows.  While I can’t imagine ever going to such a carnival sideshow attraction in […]

In 2016, the Cincinnati Zoo had a horrible tragedy where a child somehow got into the gorilla exhibit, irritating Harambe, a male silverback.  Fearing for the life of the child, zoo authorities fatally shot Harambe, and there was the resulting expected flurry of memes and impassioned discourse.  I don’t have an opinion as to whether […]

I’m baffled by movies which bring together famous fictional characters that would not normally be associated with each other.  An example which comes to my mind as such a failure is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.   More successful, but still confusing to me, is 1987’s The Monster Squad. I had not seen it until 2024, […]

I am neither a fan nor a huge detractor of Disney, but I was aware of the spate of garbage direct-to-video sequels they went through for a while there.  That there is a sequel to Bambi feels as weird to me as if somebody made a sequel to Titanic.  I’ll confess I have seen one […]

At the turn of this century, Disney found itself in another of its weird dry spells where their animated features were struggling to find an audience.  This time, they were their own worst enemy, as their Pixar division was cranking out the hits, while the parent company was trying to figure out what audiences were […]

Since the dawn of time, one of the existential questions which has puzzled humankind is who, exactly, let the dogs out.  In 2000, The Baha Men released an incredibly popular song concerning this philosophical brainteaser, not realizing the question had already been answered in 1942 horror B-movie The Strange Case of Doctor Rx.  In this […]

1993’s Murders in the Zoo is pre-code horror picture, and you’ll know it is when a guy turns to the camera and you see his mouth has been sewn shut, and so crudely that there’s a fair amount of blood as well. This happens to the unfortunate guy who tries to put the moves on […]