1972’s The Blood Splattered Bride opens with a quote from Plato.  Already I was thinking of how many lousy novels are preceded by a quote from Shakespeare, and I feel a Greek philosopher would be held in similar regard.  In this case, the quote is: “The good ones are those who are content to dream […]

The most reprehensible commercial video game released has to be the Atari 2600 release Custer’s Revenge.  Despite the primitive graphics, it is still easy to tell the player controls an aroused man who tries to get across the screen to force himself on a Native American woman tied to a post.  Some reviewers of the […]

I wonder what it is about eastern European countries that their more unusual fare tends to be very different from what most viewers in English-speaking territories are used to, while films from such a country also somehow manage to be similar to each other. Such is the case with 1981 Czech picture The Mysterious Castle […]

A strange dichotomy concerns 80’s all-girl rock bands.  You can like both The Go-Go’s and The Bangles, but you’re going to like one of them more than the other.  What seems to surprise most people is the former started out as a punk band fully committed to that aesthetic.  People seem to think artists can’t, […]

Sun Ra has intrigued me for decades now.  I am not a huge fan, but I discovered his work around the same time I became aware of artists like The Residents, and I suspect there many fans of the latter who are also those of the former.  For those not in the know, Ra claimed […]

One of the best music box sets I own is Rhino’s four-CD Girl Group Sounds: One Kiss Can Lead to Another.  I already liked tracks by such groups before buying it, but I was largely aware only of Phil Spector’s productions.  This set greatly expanded by musical education. It was like radio from a parallel […]

Record Store Day used to be a really big deal to me.  I still look forward to each new occurrence, but I no longer camp outside overnight like I used to.  For one memorable installment, my brother-in-law was there with me.  To pass the time, I brought a portable DVD player and he brought the […]

I haven’t seen every Audrey Hepburn film, but I thought I was at least aware of each of them.  So, I was intrigued when a blu-ray was announced of 1964’s Paris When It Sizzles.  What is this movie and how had I not heard of it before?  It reunites the actress with William Holden, her […]

1970’s The Man Who Haunted Himself is weirdly prescient in regard to a single line.  Roger Moore, still three years away from his debut as Bond, says of corporate espionage that there are more forms of espionage in form alone than what is in the Bond movies.  Here, Moore is an executive of the type […]

The old blues song “Motherless Children” rattles off one family member after another who can’t properly fill the void left when a mother dies.  1950 noir Gun Crazy shows us something the song fails to mention and that is, while an older sister tries to do the best she can, she can’t keep a kid […]

1955 noir Crashout opens with a prison escape, a staple of the genre.  The first shot is of prisoners stampeding towards the camera.  Then we cut to a shot over the fortification in the other direction, where prisoners have somehow gone through the wall and are now outside the facility.  We are not shown how […]

Susan Tyrrell must have led an interesting life.  Being Oscar nominated for Best Actress for 1972’s Fat City didn’t dissuade her from going on to do Andy Warhol’s Bad or playing Queen Doris in Richard Elfman’s deeply weird Forbidden Zone.  In 1981, she starred with Jimmy McNichol in the off-beat horror film Butcher, Baker, Nightmare […]

I wonder if anybody excited to see 1978’s Gray Lady Down thought they were about to watch a geriatric take on Deep Throat?  Instead, it is a sub that is the “gray lady” that goes “down” after a collision with another vessel. This is the kind of film where the captain of that sub is […]

Jaws spawned so many bad imitators, but 1977’s Orca: The Killer Whale might have the most unusual crew.  The S.S. Bumpo (no, really) is captained by Richard Harris (who I will always first associate with the horrible song “MacArthur Park”), with Keenan Wynn as his second (and I will always associate him with Dr. Strangelove) […]