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 […]

Autumn is my favorite time of year, when the colors of the foliage are at their most vivid.  Alas, it is the shortest of the seasons, as those leaves start falling almost as soon as they have turned. I think it is deliberate 2002’s Far from Heaven opens in the peak of that season, as […]

Veronica Lake was huge star in her time, though seemingly not highly regarded by critics today.  One thing for certain is she was greatly disliked by many of her peers at the time, with Joel McCrea dubbing her “Moronica Lake”.  I always thought she was good in the film noirs I had seen her in, […]

Comedies that riff on Sherlock Holmes tend to not fare very well, and I wonder why that is.  And this is coming from somebody who found even a few crumbs of merit in the largely dire The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother.  Never mind the Cook and Moore abomination that is their 1978 adaptation […]

You can learn all kinds of strange “facts” from old horror b-movies.  1943’s The Mad Ghoul, for example, taught me how ancient artists of some primitive culture would draw stink lines to communicate some noxious odor that would knock people out.  This “ancient” artwork is closer to early 20th century comic strip art than hieroglyphics. […]

1941’s All That Money Can Buy takes the traditional Faust story and sets it in rural New Hampshire in the early 19th century.  The original Stephen Vincent Benet story this is based on did so in order to incorporate famous real-life senator and lawyer Daniel Webster, as he defends in a court of the damned […]

1942’s The Mad Doctor of Market Street is a curious little B-movie, and part of that is due to the title, as the film spends very little time at that location.  Mad scientist Lionel Atwill believes he can resuscitate dead people and, surprise!, it turns out he can’t.  The widow of the man who was […]

1947’s The Lost Moment opens on an odd zoom-in on a gap between books on a shelf, as the narrator tells us about a book that wasn’t published, a collection of the love letters of the poet Jeffrey Ashton. This information comes to us from Robert Cummings, a fellow writer who, decades after the death […]

I never thought it would be difficult to be a Peter Cushing fan but, dear lord, I’m only two titles into this Cushing Curiosities box set and it’s already killing me.  The first, Tender Dracula, set the bar so low that it seemed impossible for any of the other works in the box to clear […]

2012’s ParaNorman has an elementary school kid with a problem.  Norman, as voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, sees dead people everywhere and can even converse with them.  Throughout the film, I was thinking how that was going to make puberty even more difficult than it is for most people.  Everybody sees some privacy in those years, […]

If Satan is supposed to be the great deceiver, you’d think he would clever enough to never have to reuse the same gags.  And yet, the opening scene of 2024’s The First Omen recalls the moment in the 1976 film for which this is a prequel, as a priest played by Charles Dance is killed […]

I had been aware of 1973’s Ganga & Jess long before finally seeing it and was excited to finally take the plunge.  There was a fair amount of promise in an independently produced horror film from a Black writer/director, a film which often had the word “poetic” used when describing it.  Now I have seen […]

Some movies don’t stand up to a second viewing, and I found this to be the case with 1983’s The Keep.  I can’t recall how I saw the first time, but I remember being overall impressed with it.  Then I watched it again years later and I am baffled by what I saw in it […]