Back in the day when I had a working laserdisc player, one of my favorite sets was a collection billed as The World’s Greatest Animation.  Despite that title, it was far from comprehensive and largely limited to fare from the National Film Board of Canada (though they did make a great deal of amazing animation!).  […]

Marilyn Monroe had odd choices in spouses, having been married to Arthur Miller and then Joe DiMaggio.  Who knows what lovers she had outside of marriage (as if that’s any of our business), but I’m guessing there were more than a few curious choices among those as well.  An even stranger pairing is her and […]

When I think of old British steam trains, I usually picture them in miniature.  I might recall Thomas the Tank Engine or the Kinks’s song “The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains”.  I am less likely to imagine them as the setting for a daring gold heist, one in which Sean Connery is running across the […]

1968’s The Vengeance of She, Hammer’s sequel to their own She, is a curiously shoddy affair.  While watching it, my wife remarked it was like watching two unrelated movies which had been edited together.  As for myself, I felt like I had seen less than one movie. Not that the previous film was anything special.  […]

One would think a franchise of four zombie Knights Templar movies would have been sufficient for the Spanish market in the early 70s, yet there is 1975’s The Devil’s Cross trying to get a piece of that action. The director of the better-known series (relatively speaking, for such a very niche genre) was Amando de […]

It is Ireland in 1810 and Mary Ryan is a true child of nature.  She is so naturally attuned to the plants, animals and the weather that it scares her.  She can sense something huge and terrifying under the surface, another world waiting to come through.  Ryan is the star of 1982’s The Outcasts, a […]

I am fond of George Sanders and the droll manner in which he always presented himself on-screen and in real life.  This is an actor well-suited to deliver clever and incisive dialogue, and I didn’t think any movie could have enough of that.  Then I saw 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and realized how […]

Kirk Douglas is pretty good at playing a certain type of media-savvy, self-centered monster.  Perhaps his best outing in such a role is in 1951’s Ace in the Hole.  His newspaperman had worked for the top outlets in all the big cities, with each resulting from yet another termination due to his recklessness and selfishness.  […]

Having recently survived the presidential election of 2024, it is impossible to not think of that when watching 1959 UK comedy Left Right and Centre.  The candidates for office in this are an educated and intelligent woman running for the liberals, while the conservatives rally around a buffoon of a man who is famous only […]

There is a significant difference between the worst films shot on film and those on video.  Film requires more expensive equipment, money to pay a lab to process it, an editor to undertake the costly process of linear editing, prints to be made.  When somebody makes that kind of investment, a filmmaker usually tends to […]

We weren’t far into the 1973 indie horror film Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood when my wife said she bet Rob Zombie was a fan of it.  Closer to the end, I was thinking the picture had devolved into such a mess that I’m certain he will remake it eventually. One positive thing I can say […]

1964’s Nothing But the Best is an odd British dark comedy which straddles a line between the whimsical comedies of Ealing Studios and the more cynical and outré fare of the mid to late 60’s.  It feels like a mash-up of The Talented Mr. Ripley and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, though […]

Carole Lombard co-starred with Fred MacMurray in four feature films.  One I had not seen until recently is 1936’s The Princess Comes Across, an unusual and unsettled mix of whodunit and screwball comedy. Lombard boards a cruise ship while surrounded by paparazzi, as she is going to Hollywood to work as a studio’s latest star […]