Parental expectations can be a cruel thing.  Just look at WWI war veteran Arthur O’Connell and how he treats his son Don Knotts.  His rearing of Knotts was apparently militaristic in nature, with him being literally marched around the house at his father’s command.  Then he sends in an application to NASA for Knotts to […]

The forbidden film arrived in the mail years after buying it.  The unlabeled, burned blu-ray arrived in a paper sleeve.  I felt unclean just owning this, as if I was part of a tape trading community for some horrific form of pornography. It seems surreal to me one can walk into a Barnes & Noble […]

1974’s Sugar Hill is a weird beast, a hybrid of zombie, gangster and Blaxploitation genres.  It is truly number one in a field of one. Marki Bey stars as the title character.  She’s hellbent on revenge for the murder of husband Larry Don Johnson, emphasis on “hell”.  With the assistance of an old voodoo woman […]

I first cottoned to the work of David Lynch through his Blue Velvet, just a little before Twin Peaks became a sensation.  I even have a weird association with his Eraserhead, as I accidentally burned microwave popcorn the first time I saw it, so I now smell that if I so much as think about […]

I used to sneer at light entertainment, thinking “harmless” was an adjective one should only use in the pejorative.  Live long enough, and the harsh realities of the world tend to make one have a greater appreciation of fare one might describe in that way. 1966’s The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is the textbook example […]

The Atari 2600 had some gloriously batshit titles.  For example, there was Communist Mutants from Outer Space, which is actually an incredibly solid game, almost in spite of the silly name. 2011 found footage sci-fi horror film Apollo 18, has aliens that can disguise themselves as rocks destroy our flag.  And this is near a […]

Italy’s first lunar mission isn’t going well.  I’d say the first problem is their spaceship is a paper cut-out of the Apollo 11 lunar module.  It lands successfully, but something happens to one of the astronauts, rendering them unconscious.  Another of the crew is apparently sick of their shit, dragging them away from the lunar […]

Home invasion movies get under my skin.  I guess one could say they are usually successful, since that’s the goal of them.  Still, it is a sub-genre I don’t actively seek out. The most disturbing such scene I have had the displeasure of encountering in a film was in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.  […]

Seldom have I been rooting for the bad guys as much as I did while watching 1947’s The Shop at Sly Corner.  I also cannot recall ever wanting to see one character to kill another as much I did here. The two I wanted to get away with everything are Oscar Homolka and Manning Whiley.  […]

The 1974 TV movie adaptation of Dracula has a brief, great moment where we see the wreck of the Demeter, the ship that has brought the title character to British soil.  There’s a remarkable amount of wreckage on the beach.  Most shocking is a dead man lashed to the wheel, crucifix in hand. There is […]

I keep thinking of steampunk as an annoying genre that only appeared in the past couple of decades, and then I remember it is actually a very old style, going back to the works of Jules Verne.  Other authors also dabbled in it, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose silly At the Earth’s Core was […]