The UK in the 60’s produced an endless run of fictional films starring whichever acts were most popular at a particular time.  These movies were inevitably quirky and insanely perky.  That trend continued into the 70’s, though the output quickly reduced to a trickle.    Those later films, however, cast a more cynical eye towards stardom. […]

Anglophiles like myself are all too familiar with the bizarre, yet distinctive, style the BBC employed for the vast majority of their output in the 70s and 80s.  Location footage would be shot on film, but interiors were inevitably shot on video, complete with artless overhead lighting.  It took years but I eventually acclimated to […]

Freddie Krueger, Happy Days’s Joanie, My Favorite Martian and Captain Spaulding are on an interstellar mission in a ship captained by Laura Palmer’s mom.  Is there any reason you shouldn’t see 1981’s Galaxy of Terror, produced by Roger Corman? Well, yes, actually. And that is the moment where Taaffe O’Connell is raped by a giant […]

Steven Soderbergh has a strange body of work.  I like to think he only takes on projects that are of interest to him.  He hasn’t done much I suspect was a work-for-hire. Take 2019’s The Informant!, for example.  Based on a true story (or ”tattle-tale”, as the poster’s tagline has it) about a whistleblower, the […]

Movies based on well-known true stories always seem a bit odd to me, as you already know the ending.  But the best of those movies keep you engaged enough that one either forgets how the story will end, or even wonders if it could somehow turn out differently. Such is the case with 1948’s Scott […]

The original Friday the 13th has a lot to answer for, not just for itself and its own lousy sequels, but for all the imitations spawned in its wake.  I may be a fan of horror, in general, but the slasher is one of my least favorite sub-genres. 1983’s The Final Terror is not the […]

The feature-length experimental film Anti-Clock starts out promising, as the opening credits are filmed off an extremely staticky monitor.  There is a strange beauty in that image distortion, something I imagine wasn’t as appreciated in 1979 as it is today, with the current nostalgia for analogue video. Much of this film by Jane Ardern and […]

Hammer Films of the late 50’s, and throughout the 60’s, had one of the most solid track records for horror and thriller pictures of any studio of any era.  Then the 70’s came, and things unraveled quickly and thoroughly.  The early Hammer horror films outraged British censors and shocked audiences.  Most of them were given […]

1989’s The Dream Team is a comedy about four mental patients who have to work together to rescue their doctor after an incident on a field trip from the asylum.  I feel it would be too easy to make comparisons to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and yet this feels roughly like a comedic […]

A small propeller plane flies over a vast wasteland of felled trees in the Canadian forest.  In a scene which reminded me of the opening of The Wicher Man, it touches down on a lake in what is obviously a very isolated area.  A man steps out of the plane, wades to the shoreline and […]

The actor Audie Murphy was the most decorated combat soldier of WWII, receiving the Medal of Honor and awards for bravery from France and Belgium. I mention this because I didn’t believe him as a boxer a single second of 1956’s World in my Corner.  This is the third and last movie in a Kino […]

I miss those Director Series DVD collections of music videos, each dedicated to a different director.  Music video collections met their demise largely because of the advent of YouTube, which is a shame.  Not sure why the length of a film warrants whether or not it should also be on physical media.  I don’t believe […]

I don’t like boxing, wrestling and similar sports, so I am amazed by the hypocrisy when a crowd yelling “KILL HIM” turns on a fighter when their opponent perishes in the ring.  It says something sad about human nature that people can go from blood-crazed to sanctimonious at the drop of a hat. In 1955’s […]

If you’re a hitman, don’t get an eye exam on the same day you’re scheduled to do a job.  This is an important lesson I learned watching 1991’s Diary of a Hitman.  In the meantime, I learned another lesson: there really isn’t any reason to spend 90 minutes watching Diary of a Hitman. The movie […]

Rob Savage was the writer/director of Host, my favorite movie of 2020.  That horror film breathed fresh air into the genre of found footage, which was growing staid.  Most pleasantly surprising to me was it was only as long as it needed to be, clocking in at 57 minutes. So when I heard Savage was […]