This was the last movie I watched on Arrow Video’s blu-ray boxed set showcasing five films Empire Pictures produced in the 1980’s.  Though they were of different genres (OK, two: sci-fi and/or horror), and made by a few different directors and other creative personnel, these had a weird aesthetic that seemed to suggest more connective […]

2018’s The Possession of Hannah Grace starts out with several strikes against it.  First, it is yet another exorcism movie.  I don’t know why I am so committed to seeing every movie of that horror sub-genre, as every one of them except The Exorcist is varying degrees of crap.  Secondly, it was distributed by Screen […]

Unexpectedly, I had fun watching the first three films on Arrow’s blu-ray box Empire of Scream: Enter the Video Store.  These were low-budget films with aspirations well beyond their budgets.  Each actually had some effects, dialog, performances and plot developments I had not anticipated.  Then I got to the fourth disc, Arena, and it was […]

1969’s The Mad Room is a suspense thriller with Shelley Winters in the largest of the supporting roles.  That alone may tell you everything you need to know about this film and decide whether or not it is right for you. The actual star is Stella Stevens, as the secretary to Winters.  Winters had been […]

Barbara Stanwyck is a newspaper columnist being pressured by a misogynist cop to surrender the location of a woman who murdered her husband.  Her face says “you and what army?” while her mouth says, “Make me.” This happens early in 1956’s Crime of Passion.  This is a picture usually labelled as a film noir, but […]

Pity the poor moviegoer who paid to see The Spirit Is Willing in the theater in 1967.  A comedy in only the loosest sense of the word, everything about it is straight out of a sitcom from the era.  The jokes are lame.  The sets are artlessly lit.  Every outdoor shot with any of the […]

In the essays and extras accompanying the Criterion Collection blu-ray of Targets, Peter Bogdanovich goes to great pains to state his movie does not have an anti-gun perspective.  Methinks he protests too much, as it is hard to believe there wasn’t this intention behind it.  Then again, George Romero has always been insistent Night of […]

W.C. Fields once famously remarked one should never work with children or animals.  Not sure if I would include cockroaches in the latter.  I doubt he could envision a future where somebody would want to use the insects in a film.  Judging from the numerous tales told about them in the documentary Just Desserts: The […]

I’m not up to it anymore, but I have camped out on sidewalks overnight for many of the past years’ Record Store Days.  In 1951’s The Galloping Major, Basil Radford is much older than I am now, and yet he should have camped out overnight at a horse auction that is essential to the plot.  […]

On October 3, 2027, I will have gone twenty years without a drink.  I look forward to celebrating that anniversary with a round of shots.  I kid!  Well, about the shots, at least.  About the temperance, not so much.  I guess since I write under an alias, I really put the “anonymous” in Alcoholics Anonymous. […]

I am increasingly wondering what qualifies as “horror” in selections chosen for the Universal Horror series of blu-ray sets Scream Factory has been issuing.  Tower of London, to cite one example, was entirely a history drama, with the only trappings of the genre being the castle’s torture chamber. 1941’s The Black Cat is a comedy […]

Many movies stumble to some extent in their second acts.  On rare occasions, a picture might hit its stride in the second half, only for me to be let down by the third.  Such is the case with 1950’s One Way Street. This curious noir stars James Mason as a doctor who flees gangster Dan […]

How strange it is that, with studios creating any and all kinds of spectaculars to lure audiences back to theatres, we don’t have many big, loud and stupid sci-fi blockbusters anymore (emphasis on stupid).  Mind you, I always found films like Armageddon laughable, at best.  Today, it is rare for there to even be another […]

Except in melodramas, women were rarely top billed in features in 1950.  Alexis Smith is the lead of that year’s Undercover Girl, as the title character.  That this is a female-led noir is a reason to seek this out, but there is more of interest here than that. When we first meet Smith, at the […]

It is often hard to decide whether a film is noir or not.  In many regards, the 1952 feature Angel Face has the trappings of that genre.  On the other hand, it is very heavy on the melodrama.  That doesn’t automatically disqualify a film from being noir but, in my mind, it makes it more […]