For as brilliant as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle supposedly was, his belief in fairies made him seem like a bit of a nutjob.  Of course, the only reason his name is still in the public consciousness is for the Sherlock Holmes stories.  But he wrote other stories as well, and some of those are less […]

Gary Merrill had once been married to Bette Davis, after they fell in love on the set of All About Eve.  He had been separated from her for five years when he starred in 1965’s Catacombs (later retitled to The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die), a movie where he conspires to kill his financially successful but […]

A curious subgenre of noir is that where the investigation is to find carriers of a disease before it can spread into an epidemic.  A couple of such films I have seen before include Panic in the Streets and The Killer that Stalked New York.  1949’s Chicago Deadline is in a similar vein as those, […]

Since starting this blog, there are few movies I watch which I do not consequently write about.  So it’s odd I did not feel any need to comment on the first five films in the Powerhouse/Indicator blu-ray boxed set Columbia Noir #5: Humphrey Bogart.  In total, the set has six Bogie-related films I have not […]

I read something recently about how many conspiracies can be dismissed out of hand because 1) people inherently have a compulsion to talk, and 2) the more people in on a secret makes it that much more difficult to keep it under wraps. I am reminded of the old adage that two can keep a […]

A couple of days after watching 1987’s Hidden City, I’m wondering how it could have gone so wrong.  There’s actors I like in the cast, such as Charles Dance, Bill Paterson and Richard E. Grant.  The plot centers around a forbidden film, a literary and cinematic trope I’m a sucker for.  There’s even a government […]

2022’s Moon Garden is movie that wears its many influences on its sleeve.  I’m not sure it was directly inspired by any or all of these, but I saw similarities to the more imaginative, but rather dark, films of the 80’s that were centered around children, such as Time Bandits and Paperhouse.  There’s stop motion […]

1956’s Forbidden Planet was a minor hit, growing in stature over the course of a decade or two.  The film had been hugely popular with kids, and it isn’t like they loved it because it had roughly the same plot as Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  No, they loved Robby the Robot, an element of the film […]

In 1953, the movie studios were terrified by the threat television posed to their livelihoods.  I have seen many films from that era that took satirical jabs at the medium, but that year’s The Twonky is the first time I have seen an anthropomorphic TV set appear as a villain. Hans Conried is perfectly cast […]

In the book Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, Katharine Coldiron explains how hard-to-follow logic in some bad films makes them tiring to watch.  I almost fell asleep watching 1944’s The Lady and The Monster, and I believe it was because of that.  Here is a cheapo horror film which pairs a Frankenstein type plot […]

Tim Burton has a lot to answer for.  What was once so startlingly original in his early films soon became a lazy visual shorthand to communicate “weird”.  It is used to be lazy filmmakers would lift from Dali or Escher before Burton become the default.  The dreamworld in which the big finale of 2024 Imaginary […]

2023’s The Unheard is a curious beast in that it wants to be three or four different films.  Unfortunately, it not only has insufficient connective tissue between those disparate elements, but it has barely enough material for a one-hour movie.  Alas, the runtime of this is two hours, five minutes. The plot is, ostensibly, about […]

Funny how all the ghosts in 1964’s Danza Macabra keep telling the protagonist Georges Rivière they are spirits, yet he doesn’t believe them.  I have to concede I also would not believe them.  And yet, I kept waiting for our hero to realize he’s surrounded by gh-gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts!!! and then one of them to respond, “Well, […]

Survivor’s guilt is good fodder for a horror movie, being used well in fare as diverse as super-low-budget 1962 classic Carnival of Souls to 1981’s The Survivor to the Final Destination series of this century.  I think it is odd that a shared feeling among most people who survive a traumatic event believe they didn’t […]