1957’s The Long Haul is a UK noir starring Victor Mature as an American who, upon getting his discharge from the service, finds himself making house in Liverpool with his wife (Gene Anderson) and son (Michael Wade).  She arranges a job driving long-haul trucks for her uncle (Wensley Pithey). Mature is less than thrilled with […]

While watching 1973’s The Final Programme, I found myself desperate to know if this was a completely ad-libbed movie.  Despite having some attractive, and expensive-looking sets, this is a movie where characters go from one location to another but often without any reason I could discern.  They exchange dialog, but without any real communication seeming […]

Mill Creek is a media distributor which gets a great deal of cinema and television onto DVD and bluray, much of which would be unlikely to find release on physical media if not for them.  They get a lot of flak for most of their releases being bare bones.  I have also read complaints about […]

Legendary UK film studio Hammer continues to fascinate me.  Though largely known for their horror output, that really only began in earnest with 1958’s Horror of Dracula.  Prior to that, and continuing for some time after, the studio was more focused on science fiction.  In 1955, the studio had a major success with their film […]

2024’s Stopmotion recently left me frustrated, and I thought hard about why that was.  I didn’t find anything in it to be scary, but there were some respectably creepy moments.  It is very much in the mold of contemporary, art-house horror, yet it still has more of a plot than many similar films I have […]

Irene Dunne used to be a huge star, so much so that she was billed over Cary Grant for screwball comedy classic The Awful Truth in 1937.  She was still top-billed in the similarly madcap Lady in a Jam five years later, though this is nowhere near as sharp as that earlier film. Something feels […]

This 1991 neo-noir opens with a scene that got under my skin.  It is a one-two punch of home invasions in Los Angeles. At the first house, there’s a birthday party for a teen boy underway, and this event is being videotaped by his father.  Cynda Williams appears to be a friend of the family […]

Clive Barker has an odd legacy on film.  He completely disowned the movie made from the first story he wrote, which was Underworld.  No, not the picture you’re thinking of, but one George Pavlou directed in 1985 and which isn’t strictly horror.  I find it strange Barker teamed up with Pavlou again just a year […]

The legend of Robin Hood is one of those stories everybody knows, but which has never really clicked with me.  I’m curious why it has endured as long as it has.  It seems, even today, somebody feels compelled to make another movie or television series of it from time to time. I doubt anybody will […]

The term “toxic masculinity” has been in vogue for the past few years.  While I think it is correct to call men out on our bullshit, films such as 1950’s The Capture reveals some weird expectations society has put on men to be “macho”, and I think that environment is partly responsible for some of […]

I am a big fan the two Dr. Phibes movies.  Some people seem to find them mean-spirited, but I think they’re too goofy to take seriously.  Part of what sells it is how much fun Vincent Price is having.  John Considine isn’t Price, but he channels some of that diabolical glee as the villain in […]

I have yet to see a film with the outlandishly popular Minions in it, and yet I find the adoption of them into current zeitgeist irritating.  Hands down, the single worst aspect of 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife were the mini Stay Pufts, which were basically the Minions of that film.  Somebody behind 2024’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire […]