Despite being a self-professed anglophile, it has taken me an unusually long time to become acquainted with the Carry On series of films.  This British comedy institution appears to be simultaneously widely loved and derided, with each entry parodying a different subject. My introduction to the series is 1966’s Carry On Screaming, a horror parody […]

I hate the term “children’s entertainment”.  It takes something that could potentially be enjoyed by all ages and puts it in that ghetto of things only to be enjoyed by pre-teens and endured by their parents.  Unfortunately, some of that marginalization is for good reason.  There has been far too much cheap garbage dumped on […]

There’s a cliché about how the young who aren’t liberal don’t have a heart, and the old who aren’t conservatives have no head.  I feel a similar sentiment about the work of Hunter S. Thompson.  I loved his books like “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas” when I was in my 20’s, but I can’t […]

There are some movies I happen to see through a bizarre set of connections. Consider this: I just happened to buy the three-disc edition of the Al Jolson The Jazz Singer because it was cheap enough and I hadn’t seen it before.  One of the special features was about the difficulty studios had to adjusting […]

I have known about this movie for so long, and have read and heard so much about it, I’m surprised it took me so long to see it. Quatermass (quay-ter-mass) is a very popular character in the world of UK science fiction.  Nowhere near as popular of Doctor Who, but still enough of a draw […]

In the past year or so, I have finally developed an appreciation for 50’s sci-fi horror.  I mention this because I was born well after that era and I had to readjust my way of thinking in approaching these films. Now, even though I was able to start enjoying those older films, I think it […]

A smart, sweet girl and the two dads who adopted her are vacationing at a remote cabin, only to experience a home invasion from four strangers.  These invaders say these are the end times and the world can only be saved if one of the three (the girl or either dad) is killed by another […]

Old black & white movies.  There are many common aspects of these that I find strongly endearing.  There’s other things that seem pretty laughable today.  Even back in the days of their original release, the separate beds for married couples had to subject to mockery by the general public. I have seen hundreds of such […]

I have seen Rebecca Hall in a few films now, and she is quite versatile.  Even so, I never thought I would see her do a puppet show.  Yet here she is, a puppet on each hand, framed by a crude mock-up of a television, doing a “stranger danger” bit for the benefit of hospitalized […]

Since the 1990’s, I have been a fan of The Residents, a group whose best-known characteristic is their anonymity. The group had their own record label, Ralph (as in the slang for vomiting), on which they had off-beat artists who likely would have been unable to find a home elsewhere. The best known of these […]

I love physical effects.  No knock on CGI, which can be done well, but tactile objects on the screen usually work better for me.  Even better are effects that aren’t even effects.  In Ghost Story, for example, there’s a neat moment where a ghost descends a staircase where a large portion of the stairway is […]

It is just after dawn, but before anybody is on the streets of a very small town.  Despite the absence of cars, a vehicle slowly comes to complete stop at any intersection and signals they are turning right. We’re not even out of the opening credits and we already know something about the driver.  Here […]

Some movies are so overpowering, so easy to obsess over, that we feel a void in their wake.  Casablanca was one such movie, and it is only natural that other works would try to recapture some of that magic, or least the ambiance of its faux-exotic locale. It would be easy to dismiss Tangier as […]

I am not a fan of the Italian niche of horror known as “giallo” but it intrigues me, so I keep digging deeper into the genre. Shock was Mario Bava’s last film and…let’s just say his career didn’t end on a high point.  This is far from the worst horror movie I have seen.  It […]

In 2012, some of the confetti used in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was discovered to be shredded internal files of the Nassau County Police Department.  Intact strips of paper included names, address, phone numbers and social security numbers of officers, including some who were working undercover. While we know the importance of internal documents […]