As much I love The Blair Witch Project, it hasn’t exactly been the best influence on cinema.  While I am grateful it gave a boost to the found footage genre still going strong to this day, it has also seemed to be direct influence for such flawed works as 2014’s As Above, So Below. And […]

Kino Lorber continues to churn out their three-movie Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema sets and I keep happily buying them.  As I write this, they have just announced the 20th volume in the series.  With that many titles, there will doubtlessly be a few that are controversial in being labeled as “noir”.  The […]

Former Cincinnati mayor Jerry Springer had his political career derailed when it was discovered he had used personal checks to pay prostitutes for their services.  While that seemed pretty stupid of him, I also wondered why these working girls took checks as payment.  First, I wonder how they knew the checks wouldn’t bounce.  Even more […]

Ernst Lubitsch had an amazing run of features in the late 30’s and early 40’s, a period that included Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not To Be.  Unfortunately, he also did 1941’s That Uncertain Feeling. This screwball comedy is uneven in every regard: plot, script, performances.  It is like it […]

Of the many characters and creatures in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of Lord of the Rings, my favorite may be the Nazgul, the nine former human kings who have been transformed by Sauron into wraiths.  When we first see them, they are riding what appear to be undead horses.  They are entirely badass, and, in […]

As the old joke goes, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, boy, practice.”  Failing that, you could also always get engaged to the eldest daughter (Lugene Sanders) of a wealthy businessman (Harry Fleer), like Richard Carlson does in Bert I. Gordon’s 1960 ghost story Tormented. Carlson plays a supposedly gifted jazz pianist, though […]

There are some songs that so astound me that I can vividly recall when I first heard them.  For example, I can remember the first time I heard “Cannonball” by The Breeders on the radio, as I think it was the only time I was so stunned by a song that I pulled off the […]

Jack Palance is not among the very last of the actors I would consider to play Dracula, if only because he never would have been anywhere on the list of candidates, period.  I have found him to be very good in some movies, not so good in others, but he lacks many of the qualities […]

There is one especially memorable sequence, among many, in 1966’s Picture Mommy Dead.  In an unbroken shot, a young woman played by Susan Gordon is running toward the camera with a hawk swooping down behind her.  I imagine it was easy to act terrified for that scene, and I wondered if she was genuinely terrified.  […]

As soon as a horror movie lays out rules, you know those rules are going to be broken.  In the first scene of 2023’s Baghead we see Peter Mullen taking to the camera as he records a video of such rules for the next owner of his pub to observe.  We’re only a couple of […]

Whenever there is a newspaper or magazine article or headline shown in a movie, pause for a moment to check out the other elements around it on the page.  After all, somebody had to come up with some sort of filler and, often, these bits that would normally evade notice can be curious items.  They […]

I have seen many comedies where I found myself unable to laugh because the characters are too stupid to be believable.  I realize people in comedies rarely act like real human beings—that is part of the reason why those are comedies.  But the premise of a picture, and the world it builds, sets the bounds […]

Now here’s a strange animal—in a way, two of them, in fact.  1967’s King Kong Escapes pits the titular ape against a robotic version of himself.  And it takes its sweet time getting to that matchup, filling the runtime up with things that aren’t very interesting, because the audience is desperately waiting for King Kong […]

Truly, the strangest thing that has ever crossed my mind while watching a film occurred at one point in 2012’s The Pirates: Band of Misfits!  One of the best characters is a monkey Charles Darwin (David Tennant) has employed as a butler, and all I could think about is a bonus track on a reissue […]

I recently read an article saying studios don’t intend to make any more G-rated films, and that PG is the regarded as the new G.  In found this interesting, especially given how PG was a different animal in the 70’s.  I never stop being surprised when I see another such film of that rating and […]