I have seen a lot of vintage film noir.  A lot of it concerns the red scare at the time.  Y’know, the McCarthy hearings and all that.  That material hilariously locks those films so firmly in their time that they might as well be insects preserved in amber. 1988 neo-noir The House on Carroll Street […]

Despite my best intentions, I am still always comparing Joan Crawford to Bette Davis when I see the former in a picture.  That isn’t fair to her, and there are definitely movies where she is better suited to a role than Davis would have been.  A great example of such is 1950’s The Damned Don’t […]

Maybe somebody can prove me wrong, but I doubt there has ever been a good movie where running moonshine is the chief mechanism driving the plot.  The first such picture off the top of my head is White Lightnin’ Road, and what an abomination that was.  It is the kind of subject matter that consistently […]

It is awfully sad when a film cast as its lead somebody only because they are the relative of a famous actor.  Consider the pathetic Operation Kid Brother from 1967, which is one of the very few pictures to star Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil.  I thought about that feature a great many times while […]

A great many comedies of the 60’s were riffs on James Bond.  In retrospect, one would think there had to be at least one film in cinemas on any given week after 1964 that had some sort of spy hijinks in a foreign country and featuring at least one beautiful, “international” woman.  The lead actor […]

It’s weird how many films in the Disney canon are compilations of shorter films.  In some of these portmanteaus, the associations between the films will be stronger than in others.  It was a trend starting with Fantasia, and look at how tenuous the connections are between the pieces of that film. 1949’s The Adventures of […]

I listen to a great deal of psychedelic music from the late 60’s, especially that from the UK.  I suspect my listening preferences have established a false correlation in my mind, where I have misled myself into believing I also enjoy off-kilter British comedies of that era.  With each additional one I watch, I am […]

I keep thinking the comedies of the 80’s were all oversexed, but then I forgot about such glorious outliers as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which seemed to subvert every expectation one might have for a comedy from a major studio at the time.  Almost as audacious, but not quite as good, is 1983’s Strange Brew. This […]

1981’s Outland really wants to be Alien.  Its opening title sequence recalls that of the earlier film.  It takes place in a grimy, grungy mining facility on the Jupiter moon IO, but it might as well be the Nostromo.  The score is by Jerry Goldsmith, who provided that service for the other film.  Heck, I […]

Cathryn Harrison must have had a curious upbringing.  In her teenage years, she starred in two deeply weird movies: Louis Malle’s Black Moon and Robert Altman’s Images.  She was also in the Donovan-starring The Pied Piper, which had to the most traumatic of those films to make.  At least, it is the most traumatic to […]

When I first saw a blu-ray listing for 1993’s The Killing Box, I was more than a bit confused.  It isn’t that weird nowadays to have a movie where, during the civil war, both sides find themselves facing a common enemy of undead confederate soldiers. What did surprise me is the cast for this.  Really, […]

I remember the first time I saw 2002’s Reign of Fire, as I was hoping it would be as laughably bad as it looked.  I mean, just look at this plot, set in a future after an apocalypse brought on by dragons which had been unleashed from deep within the earth during a subway tunnel […]

Wendy Toye was a rarity, a woman directing features in mid-century Britain.  Unfortunately, women are still vastly in the minority among studio directors today, but that does seem to be improving. She started doing short films, among them the exceptional The Stranger Left No Card.  Unfortunately, few offers to helm features were forthcoming.  When they […]

In 1966’s Assault on a Queen, you’ll see Frank Sinatra as you’ve never seen him before: as one of those goofy deep-sea diver figurines some people put at the bottom of an aquarium.  I was just disappointed his objective wasn’t one of those tiny treasure chests where the lid occasionally opens, with a burst of […]