1941’s All That Money Can Buy takes the traditional Faust story and sets it in rural New Hampshire in the early 19th century.  The original Stephen Vincent Benet story this is based on did so in order to incorporate famous real-life senator and lawyer Daniel Webster, as he defends in a court of the damned […]

1942’s The Mad Doctor of Market Street is a curious little B-movie, and part of that is due to the title, as the film spends very little time at that location.  Mad scientist Lionel Atwill believes he can resuscitate dead people and, surprise!, it turns out he can’t.  The widow of the man who was […]

1947’s The Lost Moment opens on an odd zoom-in on a gap between books on a shelf, as the narrator tells us about a book that wasn’t published, a collection of the love letters of the poet Jeffrey Ashton. This information comes to us from Robert Cummings, a fellow writer who, decades after the death […]

I never thought it would be difficult to be a Peter Cushing fan but, dear lord, I’m only two titles into this Cushing Curiosities box set and it’s already killing me.  The first, Tender Dracula, set the bar so low that it seemed impossible for any of the other works in the box to clear […]

2012’s ParaNorman has an elementary school kid with a problem.  Norman, as voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, sees dead people everywhere and can even converse with them.  Throughout the film, I was thinking how that was going to make puberty even more difficult than it is for most people.  Everybody sees some privacy in those years, […]

If Satan is supposed to be the great deceiver, you’d think he would clever enough to never have to reuse the same gags.  And yet, the opening scene of 2024’s The First Omen recalls the moment in the 1976 film for which this is a prequel, as a priest played by Charles Dance is killed […]

I had been aware of 1973’s Ganga & Jess long before finally seeing it and was excited to finally take the plunge.  There was a fair amount of promise in an independently produced horror film from a Black writer/director, a film which often had the word “poetic” used when describing it.  Now I have seen […]

Some movies don’t stand up to a second viewing, and I found this to be the case with 1983’s The Keep.  I can’t recall how I saw the first time, but I remember being overall impressed with it.  Then I watched it again years later and I am baffled by what I saw in it […]

Roger Corman had a good run of Poe adaptations with Vincent Price.  He would eventually run out of works that were more easily translatable to feature-length films, eventually basing one work around “The Raven”, which is a rather short poem.  It is odd he made 1963’s The Haunted Palace in the middle of that run, […]

It is an understatement to say Stephen King has been prolific, yet I suspect we will eventually see every single work of his development into a movie or TV show, maybe even more than once.  I’m surprised there isn’t a film made of his Danse Macabre, and that is a non-fiction work of his musings […]

Johnny Cash could act but, let’s face it, he wouldn’t have been in anything in that capacity if he hadn’t been a famous musician first.  His one performance which always stands out in my mind was that episode of Columbo, but he even played a famous country musician in that. Not exactly a stretch. In […]

Outside of genre, films are usually grouped by their director or a particular actor.  Rarely are they known for their producer, but cineastes tend to make an exception for Val Lewton.  Known largely for his work with director Jacques Tourneur, the films he produced effectively used atmosphere to cover the low budget.  Lewton’s influence over […]

1943’s I Walked with a Zombie is movie I had some awareness of decades before actually seeing it for the first time, and that was because of R.E.M.’s cover of the same-named Roky Erickson track on the compilation Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye.  Any mention or reference to film immediately has Michael Stipe singing […]

One of the most memorable art museum exhibits I have seen was of the photography of Gordon Parks. It was an experience that instantaneously made me a fan of his work. He was the definition of a polymath, somehow an author, film director and musician in addition to being a photographer.  As if that isn’t […]