Category: Watching

Movie: Grace of My Heart (1996)

One of the best music box sets I own is Rhino’s four-CD Girl Group Sounds: One Kiss Can Lead to Another.  I already liked tracks by such groups before buying it, but I was largely aware only of Phil Spector’s productions.  This set greatly expanded by musical education. It was like radio from a parallel […]

Movie: Nightmare City (1980)

Record Store Day used to be a really big deal to me.  I still look forward to each new occurrence, but I no longer camp outside overnight like I used to.  For one memorable installment, my brother-in-law was there with me.  To pass the time, I brought a portable DVD player and he brought the […]

Movie: Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938)

1938’s Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror has the titular detective residing on Baker Street, and solving crimes with his bumbling assistant.  There’s also a middle-aged woman who cooks, cleans and fusses over him.  There’s even a Scotland Yard detective who has never bested Blake.  Any similarities to Sherlock Holmes are purely intentional. The film […]

Movie: Gun Crazy (1950)

The old blues song “Motherless Children” rattles off one family member after another who can’t properly fill the void left when a mother dies.  1950 noir Gun Crazy shows us something the song fails to mention and that is, while an older sister tries to do the best she can, she can’t keep a kid […]

Movie: Crashout (1955)

1955 noir Crashout opens with a prison escape, a staple of the genre.  The first shot is of prisoners stampeding towards the camera.  Then we cut to a shot over the fortification in the other direction, where prisoners have somehow gone through the wall and are now outside the facility.  We are not shown how […]

Movie: Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1981)

Susan Tyrrell must have led an interesting life.  Being Oscar nominated for Best Actress for 1972’s Fat City didn’t dissuade her from going on to do Andy Warhol’s Bad or playing Queen Doris in Richard Elfman’s deeply weird Forbidden Zone.  In 1981, she starred with Jimmy McNichol in the off-beat horror film Butcher, Baker, Nightmare […]

Movie: Gray Lady Down (1978)

I wonder if anybody excited to see 1978’s Gray Lady Down thought they were about to watch a geriatric take on Deep Throat?  Instead, it is a sub that is the “gray lady” that goes “down” after a collision with another vessel. This is the kind of film where the captain of that sub is […]

Movie: Orca (1977)

Jaws spawned so many bad imitators, but 1977’s Orca: The Killer Whale might have the most unusual crew.  The S.S. Bumpo (no, really) is captained by Richard Harris (who I will always first associate with the horrible song “MacArthur Park”), with Keenan Wynn as his second (and I will always associate him with Dr. Strangelove) […]

Movie: Fingerman (1955)

You might think Fingerman is an obscure Marvel superhero, but you’d be wrong.  The first indicator is because this is a film noir from 1955. The film starts with the obligatory narrator, as Frank Lovejoy says, “My name…let’s just say it’s Casey Martin”.  Not sure why he acts like he’s using an alias as we’re […]

Movie: Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

Pre-code horror is always a special thing, especially since it was such a brief period.  That timeframe was from roughly the advent of sound cinema at the tail end of the 1920’s, through to 1935, when the Production Code went into effect and essentially neutered the movies. Universal’s 1932 take on Murders in the Rue […]

Movie: Trouble in Mind (1985)

1985’s Trouble in Mind is a critically-praised 1985 neo-noir recently issued as a limited-run blu-ray from Shout Factory.  Ebert gave it his highest rating.  The description on the Shout site has little information.  I only wish they put the full text from the back of the case on their listing.  Consider: “Littered with gangsters and […]