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) […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I love the movie Cabin Boy and it is partly because of the weird sub-genre of cinema it lovingly parodies.  The 1954 Disney version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is very likely one of those inspirations.  It has a large creature; albeit, a giant squid and not a giant store manager.  It […]

The past few years have seen polling workers and the vote tabulation process subjected to extreme scrutiny, with officials and even low-level workers facing intimidation and death threats.  In 2008’s Swing Vote, young teen Madeline Carroll is so upset deadbeat dad Kevin Costner has failed to show up at the polling station, that she forges […]

When you find yourself in cheap motel room, heavily armed and with the windows obscured with cardboard and duck-tape, you know you have made some questionable life choices.  This is the scenario Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton find themselves in at the beginning of 2016’s Midnight Special.  This is just one of a series of […]

It had only been a year since King Kong, and so that film’s star is second-billed in 1934’s Black Moon.  I find that odd, since Fay Wray is a tertiary character in this, at best.  Curiously it is third-billed Dorothy Burgess who is the true star here. This is a high society woman who was […]

I have enjoyed a great deal of neo-noir, and most such films are at least partly staged in the desert.  The entirety of 2015’s The Frontier rarely loses sight of the titular diner and conjoined motel, which is in an area so desolate there are no other proximate structures.  It’s a good place to have […]

CGI is rarely convincing to me, but the alien at the center of 2020’s Sputnik is almost good enough to make me forget its DNA is all ones and zeroes.  This was even more of a surprise to me, as this is a Russian film, which I assume means less money went into it than […]

It has only been in the past five years or so that I have truly come to appreciate the Marx Brothers, but I can still recall many of the reasons why, even if I didn’t actively dislike them, I was confused by why they are so legendary.  With this in mind, I have decided to […]

We will never see the likes of the Marx Brothers again, and woe to those who try to be them.  On the other hand, we’ll never see a new Marx Brothers film, so it might be interesting if others tried to carry that torch.  It was in that frame of mind that I approached 1992’s […]

Some may wonder why the 1967 film David Holzman’s Diary was canonized into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.  Criterion also saw fit to include it in its collection; albeit, only on laserdisc.  Anybody who was confused as to why Citizen Kane is ubiquitously considered a great film will surely be downright bewildered as to why […]