$2.49 a pound, but you’ll save more if you buy in bulk. 1956 noir The Price of Fear has an interesting premise.  Lex Barker plays a man on the hook for two crimes.  Given the timing of them, he could only have committed one or the other.  Fact is, he committed neither. Merle Oberon was […]

One of my favorite meals I can remember was at a suburban Thai restaurant where the power was out at the time.  Their kitchen was gas, so they could still cook.  As long as you had cash, they would serve you.  We sat there and ate in the light breeze flowing through the space from […]

I just finished watching 1951’s Storm Warning, and I’m feeling a little punch drunk. Ginger Rogers plays a fashion model.  In a deceptively benign opening scene, she’s on a bus with her travelling companion, a co-worker who has a crush on her.  There’s a cute exchange between them, and an exposition dump where we learn […]

Hollywood sure does get some wood over movies about making movies.  1958’s The Female Animal opens on a wide shot of a movie shoot.  Our point of view is dead-on what appears to be beachside cliff.  There is a wood-and-rope bridge across a waterfall running over the edge of a cliff.  Hedy Lamarr is on […]

I hate celebrity culture.  Even hating celebrity culture is part of the omnipresent celebrity culture.  I don’t think it can even be avoided by ignoring it.  It’s like air—it’s just always there. I have only been to L.A. once but I, when I was there, everybody I met first asked me two questions: (1) where […]

1966 UK film The Wrong Box is perhaps the most gentle black comedy I have seen.  I think we’re going to need a term for this shade of black comedy: maybe charcoal grey or just grey.  What about off-white comedy? The plot concerns the final survivors of a tontine established by their fathers when they […]

For decades, I have been watching American films that supposedly take place in foreign lands, yet everybody there speaks English.  I didn’t bat an eye watching those movies, yet I found myself deeply confused by the 1965 Italian production The Vengeance of Lady Morgan when we see a character wearing a kilt.  I started wondering […]

The UK in the 60’s produced an endless run of fictional films starring whichever acts were most popular at a particular time.  These movies were inevitably quirky and insanely perky.  That trend continued into the 70’s, though the output quickly reduced to a trickle.    Those later films, however, cast a more cynical eye towards stardom. […]

Anglophiles like myself are all too familiar with the bizarre, yet distinctive, style the BBC employed for the vast majority of their output in the 70s and 80s.  Location footage would be shot on film, but interiors were inevitably shot on video, complete with artless overhead lighting.  It took years but I eventually acclimated to […]

Freddie Krueger, Happy Days’s Joanie, My Favorite Martian and Captain Spaulding are on an interstellar mission in a ship captained by Laura Palmer’s mom.  Is there any reason you shouldn’t see 1981’s Galaxy of Terror, produced by Roger Corman? Well, yes, actually. And that is the moment where Taaffe O’Connell is raped by a giant […]

Steven Soderbergh has a strange body of work.  I like to think he only takes on projects that are of interest to him.  He hasn’t done much I suspect was a work-for-hire. Take 2019’s The Informant!, for example.  Based on a true story (or ”tattle-tale”, as the poster’s tagline has it) about a whistleblower, the […]

Movies based on well-known true stories always seem a bit odd to me, as you already know the ending.  But the best of those movies keep you engaged enough that one either forgets how the story will end, or even wonders if it could somehow turn out differently. Such is the case with 1948’s Scott […]

The original Friday the 13th has a lot to answer for, not just for itself and its own lousy sequels, but for all the imitations spawned in its wake.  I may be a fan of horror, in general, but the slasher is one of my least favorite sub-genres. 1983’s The Final Terror is not the […]

The feature-length experimental film Anti-Clock starts out promising, as the opening credits are filmed off an extremely staticky monitor.  There is a strange beauty in that image distortion, something I imagine wasn’t as appreciated in 1979 as it is today, with the current nostalgia for analogue video. Much of this film by Jane Ardern and […]

Hammer Films of the late 50’s, and throughout the 60’s, had one of the most solid track records for horror and thriller pictures of any studio of any era.  Then the 70’s came, and things unraveled quickly and thoroughly.  The early Hammer horror films outraged British censors and shocked audiences.  Most of them were given […]