I was so done with zombies. In the 90s, I found myself a little ahead of the curve when I decided to see Dawn Of The Dead, after reading intriguing stories about the production in journalist Chet Flipo’s Everybody Was Kung-Fu Dancing.  Pretty soon, I was renting all kinds of tapes on the horror shelves […]

Did you wistfully watch Mad Men, secretly longing for the days of long rows of desks on floor after floor of entirely glass-fronted skyscrapers in New York City?  Does old advertising for, and items related to, Pan Am airlines have you despairing over the current state of air travel, which is basically a bus with […]

I’m trying to write this essay while still reeling from this movie.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say it feels like I walked away from a plane crash but, well, I’m not sure what to say right now. I went into this with zero expectations.  I didn’t even know what is was about.  […]

Isn’t it strange how there can be some wildly popular movies it just happens you have never seen?  Movies you weren’t actively trying to avoid, but they somehow always remained on the periphery of potential films to watch. For me, one of those movies was 1982’s 48 Hrs.  I was in elementary school when this […]

I find it odd that I have repeatedly encountered dismissive assessments of Larry Cohen’s film oeuvre, usually claiming his work is too inconsistent to be ranked along the likes of Romero and Carpenter.  I disagree with this as, the more of his work I see, I have found most of his films in a similar […]

As I have written before, I own a lot of physical media.  Regularly hitting certain deals usually results in me acquiring movies for a pittance movies of which I am previously unaware.  I like to go into a movie educated yet knowing as little as I can about the plot, so I’ll check out the […]

Coleen Gray has a great little speech in this movie.  She’s a nurse and she and a doctor (played by Richard Conte) are taking a smoke break on a balcony.  Gray’s speech is a surprisingly grim assessment of humanity.  Curiously, the actual image in this scene is greyer than anything in any other movie I […]

Some of the movies I watch I only learned about from books, which is partly why I read so many movie books.  That, and I have no life. I was turned on to Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead in the early 90’s because of a piece I read in Chet Flippo’s book Everybody Was Kung-Fu […]

I love film noir, a genre that only became a genre after the fact.  Before French critics coined the term, noir was simply “crime” pictures, usually the lower-budget second feature on a double-bill (or the “B-movie”).  So, while I may prefer to watch a movie of this type before randomly choosing one from most other […]

Pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone can be beneficial.  I have always said how much I hate musicals.  The more I thought about it, I realized I not only liked some movies with numerous musical sequences (i.e. the Marx Brothers’ Universal films) but I even liked some musical numbers, such as “On The Atchison, […]

At this time, I own over 3000 blu-ray discs and God only knows how many DVDs.  Managing this large number of titles requires rental of a storage unit.  I imagine most people, especially those who only stream media, would wonder why I would go through this effort for physical media.  One reason is because of […]

“Cute” used to be a word I used only in the pejorative. It would be very easy to dismiss this Spielberg-produced movie.  Of course it would be Spielberg (80’s Spielberg, no less) in that the elderly, eclectic and/or eccentric tenants are about to lose their ancient apartment building to an evil developer, only to have […]

The other day, I heard an announcement on XM radio saying Belinda Carlisle had a recurring show where she was spinning LA punk from the late 70s and early 80s.  When they mentioned Carlisle, I first thought of her career as an adult contemporary pop singer, and I thought that was an unusual choice to […]

In a perfect world, Roy Scheider would have been allowed to make exactly one movie in the 70s and 80s where he co-stars with a shark, and then he would have had to spend the rest of that era in thrillers set in New York City. There is something about Scheider that radiates urbane sophistication […]

It seems that every director with a distinctive, challenging style eventually reigns in their impulses and makes a more conventional feature for a major studio.  Not too long after David Lynch surprised everybody with The Elephant Man, David Cronenberg made the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone.  How strange to think both directors also turned […]