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 […]

The boy who cried wolf is one of those tropes used consistently through the history of film.  It was given a contemporary spin few times in the 80’s in such horror films such Fright Night, where you had the boy who cried vampire.  1989 film Night Visitor takes this trope even further, with the boy […]

In her prime, Elizabeth Taylor had more influence than almost any other actress in Hollywood.  I greatly admire her for some of the bizarre roles she chose at that time, including such curiosities as Reflections in a Golden Eye or Boom!, two movies I first learned about from the book The Worst Movies of All […]

I find it interesting how sports invented for movies are always a tad ridiculous.  The titular game in 1975’s Rollerball seemed to me to have elements of roulette, roller derby, motorcycle racing, jai alai and basketball.  The game the Whos play in How the Grinch Stole Christmas feels saner in comparison, and that one was […]

1947’s Time Out of Mind is largely a forgettable melodrama, but it has one scene I suspect I will remember for quite some time.  I’ll probably remember it long after I have forgotten which movie it’s from.  In this scene, a concert pianist (Robert Hutton) is on the stage of a New York City symphonic […]