1972’s Who Fears the Devil follows a hillbilly troubadour on a journey on which he has several strange encounters.  It was also released under the title The Legend of Hillbilly John, which makes more sense.  Really, it is like some weird sort of Appalachian spin on The Illiad, so I think the best possible title would […]

There may be times in one’s life when you realize some sort of sea change has happened to your psyche.  Maybe you find religion after a lifetime without it, or perhaps you part ways with a spiritual belief system with which you have been associated your entire life.  Or maybe you suddenly realize your sexual […]

A cabbie greets us as we prepare to enter the office of an unlicensed plastic surgeon.  I say “us” because what we are seeing is shot from the first-person perspective, giving this the feel of one of those horrible FMV (full-motion video) computer games of the 90’s.  Much like that format, the characters also dump […]

I was at the perfect age for the first wave of the 80’s videogame craze, so I had a few issues of magazines such as Video Games and Electronic Games.  There was one memorable ad inside the back cover of one such periodical, selling a poster of a blonde woman wearing a cut-off top and […]

The ways music has been categorized over the years often amuses me.  Today, we have such niches as dream pop, vaporwave and whatever Pitchfork decides will be a thing for usually only the next month of so.  I feel a particular bemusement concerning the category of “yacht rock”, a term so loosely defined and so […]

There is something about Bob Hope that inherently makes me want to laugh at whatever he is about to say or do, though few movies seemed to use him to his full potential.  Such is the case with 1952’s Off Limits, a film funnier than I expected to find a Hope picture of which I […]

With few exceptions, superhero movies bore me.  The ones of the most interest to me are the ones with the weirdest history.  Consider the legendarily notorious Fantastic Four from which Roger Corman produced in 1992–I have more nice things to say about it than anybody I know, though I will never bother with the other […]

“We detune big trains.” “Wind gain bee trust.” “I better dug swans in.” “and “We urge data in bins.” These are some of the anagrams I came up with from “Bretaigne Windust”, the director credited for 1951’s The Enforcer and which I thought had to be an alias.  After all, this was the blacklist era […]

I have come to greatly appreciate the films of Bill Forsyth, and I suspect Peter Capaldi is also a fan.  At least, that is what I found myself thinking in the first ten minutes or so of 1992’s Soft Top Hard Shoulder, a movie Capaldi both wrote and starred in. In an opening montage, we […]

I picked up many strange factoids when watching the 1964 sci-fi hokum that is The Time Travelers.  First, that they were still making such laughably bad films in that late year which were largely indistinguishable from such fare of ten years earlier.  Second, fire extinguishers will make the best weapons in a post-apocalyptic future, as […]

The title of 1975’s The Night of the Walking Dead recalls two different hugely popular productions concerning zombies, but it is really about vampires.  Actually, it isn’t even so much about vampires as it is about boobs.  I know heaving bosoms are a staple of the gothic cinema, but these heave out of loose blouses […]

Back in the day when I had a working laserdisc player, one of my favorite sets was a collection billed as The World’s Greatest Animation.  Despite that title, it was far from comprehensive and largely limited to fare from the National Film Board of Canada (though they did make a great deal of amazing animation!).  […]

Marilyn Monroe had odd choices in spouses, having been married to Arthur Miller and then Joe DiMaggio.  Who knows what lovers she had outside of marriage (as if that’s any of our business), but I’m guessing there were more than a few curious choices among those as well.  An even stranger pairing is her and […]

When I think of old British steam trains, I usually picture them in miniature.  I might recall Thomas the Tank Engine or the Kinks’s song “The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains”.  I am less likely to imagine them as the setting for a daring gold heist, one in which Sean Connery is running across the […]