Back-to-back Stanley Kramer movies—what was I thinking?  It wasn’t a conscious decision, as I actually grabbed two discs more or less at random.  At least, I didn’t realize at the time they shared the same director. Many directors have a signature style, but I have trouble finding consistency across Kramer’s body of work.  Here I […]

I wish I could review just the first half-hour or so of this 2 ½ hour film.  The Music Man starts out strong from the first frame.  Miniature marching band figures animated through stop-motion are used in the opening credits.  Columns of the figures spell out some names.  For some titles, they form outlines of […]

1997’s Hysteria is the kind of movie which I feel justifies my purchases of cheap discs at places like Hamilton Books.  If it hadn’t been for seeing this bluray in one of their monthly drops, I like would never have been aware of this title.  And this is a deeply weird, thought-provoking film I’m glad […]

It has long been difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff on Shudder, especially when their original content is concerned.  I intermittently subscribe for a month or so, eventually run out of promising things to watch that I don’t already have on disc, and end my subscription again.  I joined the service again recently […]

There are movies where I despise the main characters and wish they were instead about one of more of the secondary characters.  1955’s I Am a Camera is such a film. Oh, how I wish we could have followed the German couple played by Shelley Winters and Anton Diffring.  Instead, I found myself stuck with […]

Supernatural forces using modern technology rarely works for me.  Not sure why as, if I can believe a demon in a movie can communicate through a Ouija board, it isn’t much of a leap to have them manipulate computers and cell phones. In 1981’s Evilspeak, Clint Howard uses an Apple II to decipher an ancient […]

Horror isn’t just the inexplicable and terrifying happening to one person, it is also the effect on those who care about them.  Secondhand suffering, if you will.  In some movies, what happens to those concerned about another is worse than what is experienced by the one directly impacted. Consider The Exorcist: at the end, Linda […]

Oof.  This may be the most daft film noir I actually enjoyed. The movie begins with a priest getting stabbed to death in a dark alley.  Tony Curtis was a ward of the orphanage the priest ran.  Now a motorcycle cop, Curtis presses his superiors to let him go undercover to investigate a hunch he […]

“Sadists never understand why nobody else is enjoying his sadism as much as he is.” We are only a few minutes into the 2022’s Resurrection when Rebecca Hall delivers this line.  It is obvious her character was at some point on the receiving end of such behavior, as she is trembling with barely restrained rage. […]

Heartbreakers stars Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt as mother and daughter con artists. The mother ropes wealthy men into marriage, the daughter then seduces the new husbands into compromising positions where they will be discovered by the mother, and the duo walks away with large settlements. Hewitt longs to set out on her own, […]

Most of the movies later labeled as film noirs were made simply to fill the second slot of a double bill.  They were made on the cheap and were expected to deliver a moderate amount of satisfaction, at best. Outside The Law may be the most average noir I have seen so far.  It is […]

1985’s My Science Project is one of the most 80’s movies I have seen.  It may seem strange I haven’t seen it until now but I don’t have any nostalgia for an era I grew up in. John Stockwell stars as a gearhead who won’t graduate high school if he doesn’t deliver his project for […]