Mr. Show was a great comedy sketch series, with many original ideas which have stuck with me since it aired in the 90’s.  One of these is “Imminent Death Syndrome”, where David Cross is a hopeless guitar student, but who receives a preposterous amount of encouragement to continue with the instrument after it is learned […]

One of my favorite headlines from The Onion is “Elvis Dead.  Is Elvis Alive?” I’m betting Stanley Baker in 1963’s The Man Who Finally Died is feeling that way.  This German ex-pat has been a Brit since childhood, where he was informed twenty years prior that his father had died.  Now he has received a […]

I had heard nothing but bad things about 2000’s What Planet Are You From? for a couple of decades before finally seeing it.  But it was directed by Mike Nichols, and reading about it in the Elaine May biography Miss May Does Not Exist had my interest piqued. I wondered how bad a movie could […]

The title of 2013’s A Field in England is truth in advertising, in that it takes place entirely in a British field.  Set in the British Civil War, it begins with the bookish Reece Shearsmith barely escaping a skirmish to find peace on the other side of dense shrubbery.  There, he encounters a rough but […]

Funny how bobbing for eels never caught on.  Actually, it isn’t really bobbing for them which we see people thrilled to be doing at a fair in 1993’s Anchoress.  Instead, they are all too happy to frantically reach for them in a large barrel.  Whoever finally grabs one wins a hand mirror.  That kind of […]

As I write this, the 2024 US presidential election has been decided in favor of a candidate I doubt will be good for women.  One indication of that is the winner’s previous determination to end abortion, resulting in a disturbing meme on social media lately, with men declaring “your body, my choice”.  Gary Cooper’s character […]

Anybody familiar with 60’s spy spoof show Get Smart will be familiar with the recurring gag of the “Cone of Silence”.  I’m not sure what I was expecting from 1960 feature film Cone of Silence, but it is definitely not associated with that show.  That’s a shame, as the movie eventually made of that show, […]

Every once in a while, I find myself confronted by a film where I almost can’t find the words to start writing about it.  Such a movie is 1966 Italian sci-fi mess Star Pilot. To say this film is a mess would be an understatement.  If it was scripted, then whoever responsible for that was […]

The BFI blu-ray for the dire 1953 comedy Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? has as a second feature, 1952’s My Wife’s Lodger.  Somehow, this earlier film is even worse. The connection between the two is Diana Dors, who was frequently heralded as the UK’s answer to Marilyn Monroe.  In this, she is the daughter in […]

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 […]