Isn’t it great how a movie, an album or a book can come along and completely subvert your expectations?  Going into 1948’s The Boy with Green Hair, I thought it would be incredibly goofy, or at least have a sci-fi element to it.  Instead, this sweetly good-natured tale is a plea for compassion and understanding.  […]

Remakes are always a dicey proposition, especially when you’re remaking 1997 sleeper cult title Cube, where the first person we saw was quickly and cleanly diced by a trap.  I wouldn’t have thought there would be any reason for a Japanese reworking of the material.  If anything, I thought a J-horror version would have a […]

The World Health Organization recently identified aspartame as a potential carcinogen.  It seems weird they may soon be trying to take away my wife’s Diet Coke.  I know I’m not going to try to intervene.  The ending of 1951’s Peking Express has Joseph Cotten’s WHO doctor mowing down Chinese counterrevolutionaries with a machine gun.  I […]

“Vinyl is the poor man’s art collection.”  This remarkable statement appears to have been coined by Noel Gallagher of Oasis fame, however unlikely it seems to me he could ever come up with anything that clever. There’s a lot of truth in that statement, regardless of who said it first.  I know I have been […]

We barely get to see Yvonne Romain as the title character of 1973’s The Last of Sheila before she is run over by a mysterious driver.  Most of the movie takes place a year after this, aboard Sheila, a yacht owned by Romain’s widower, played by James Coburn. Sheila (the person, not the boat) had […]

Savage Steve Holland.  No air quotes around “Savage”.  That is how the director of 1986’s One Crazy Summer is billed.  This sounds like somebody who might be a pro wrestler, but he doesn’t look like one.  Still, I can imagine him being a fan of that, as this movie has a similar kind of manic […]

WTF, KLF? I admit I purchased the blu-ray of 2023’s KLF film 23 Seconds to Eternity knowing little about the musical group except they were legendary pranksters of a sort.  What intrigued me most about them is they once burned a million pounds of their money as a performance piece.  Aside from that, all I […]

Before Hammer Films made their first horror movie, and for some time after, they made all kinds of pictures, dabbling in genres like comedy, war, drama and crime.  So, although they had been doing great box office with monster movies for a few movies, they were still making like comedic fare like A Weekend with […]

I will lay it all out on the line from the beginning: 1990’s Backtrack is a terrible movie; although, like many deeply bad films, it is interesting in that it takes risks more tasteful pictures wouldn’t attempt.  Also, half of the experience of enjoying this film is the commentary track that accompanies the film on […]

While watching 1957’s Plunder Road, I found myself thinking about thinking a great deal about Henri-Georges Clouzot The Wages of Fear.  I mean that as high praise—both movies are tense and terse.  Not much dialog, but a great deal of suspense.  In both movies, that tension comes down to the transportation of nitro glycerin to […]