2010’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a remake of a 70’s made-for-TV horror movie.  As a big fan of that particular niche, I have seen the original film.  It isn’t one of my favorite horror telefilms, but it is pretty solid.  Kim Darby played a housewife who was trying to not be abducted […]

I’m always fascinated by star quality, that elusive aspect of an actor that makes them stand out from the rest of the crowd.  The person who, in a frame otherwise filled with people, will have you going, “Hey, what is that person there doing?”  Dirk Bogarde would eventually have this, but doesn’t quite yet in […]

I may love Kino’s noir sets, but they sometimes stretch the definition of that genre until it almost breaks.  Such is the case with 1955’s Hold Back Tomorrow.  It may be in the black and white, it may take place almost entirely within a prison cell, but I would never describe it as noir. This […]

Many of the most famous films legendary stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen worked on were produced by Charles H. Schneer.  I normally couldn’t care less about who was a producer on a film, which is odd when I really think about it, as some producers have had a greater impact on many pictures than the […]

I have seen a great many heist movies, yet have never seen one as economical as 1957’s The Flying Scot (a.k.a. The Mailbag Robbery).  This UK production has three criminals on a passenger train trying to steal a wealth of old money on its way to London to be destroyed, having been pulled from circulation.  […]

Peter Cushing is one of my favorite actors.  For one thing, I have yet to see him in anything where I felt he gave less than his best efforts, regardless of budget or quality of the material.  Also, regardless of the character he plays, there’s always an element beneath it all of a kindly grandfather.  […]

One of my favorite lyrics of any song “Slide” by 90’s alternative band Luna: “You can never give the finger to the blind.”  This is the mistake young Brandon Call makes in 1989’s Blind Fury when he tries to do this to a blind Rutger Hauer, and the man startles the boy by snatching his […]

One of my wife’s interests is miniatures and, through her, I have come to appreciate the art.  I have seen pictures of entire rooms done in the form and did not realize I was seeing something sized at a fraction of the real thing.  And some work of this kind is beyond the forms and […]

There are times a movie can push all the right buttons for me and yet somehow still not be a completely fulfilling experience.  For me, one of those movies was 1948 noir Force of Evil.  It has some incredibly sharp dialog.  It has some great chiaroscuro photography.   Martin Scorsese has cited it as a major […]

Prior to finally seeing 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo, all I knew about the film was all the jokes about it around the time Ronald Reagan was president.  I remember how appalled many people were that the star of something this bad could possibly get elected to the highest office in the land.  If I had […]

According to IMDB, Jess Franco directed 207 movies, short films and music videos.  I can admire that proficiency, but I usually appreciate quality over quantity.  The few films of his I had seen prior to watching 1970’s Count Dracula had left little impression on me other than confusion.  I was not surprised to learn Franco’s […]

In 1964, John Frankenheimer directed this amazing movie titled The Train, which shows various factions in Europe trying to steal, or prevent the theft of, treasures looted by the Nazis.  There’s a jaw-dropping scene where two trains collide head-on and this was accomplished by really smashing full-sized locomotives together. Roughly 15 years later, his Black […]

After watching 1970’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, I decided to do so some fact-checking.  I learned the moon is estimated to be roughly 4.5 billion years old.  The era of the dinosaurs spanned from 245 to 65 million years ago.  In comparison, the earliest homo sapiens only started appearing 300,000 years ago.  I knew […]

It is sometimes hard to tell what is a spoiler or not.  1966’s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round goes to great pains to conceal what it is about.  We’ll discover in the third act the reason for the various things that have happened up until that point, and the revelation is so unremarkable as to […]

In the opening credits for 1958’s Lonelyhearts, I noticed this was based on a novel by Nathanael West, author of Day of the Locust.  That novel was a nasty piece of work, and the 1975 film adaptation stayed true to its spirit.  I have not read the source material for Lonelyhearts, but I was curious […]