Movieline Online

Hammer Films was single-handedly responsible for the return of classic horror icons in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Their gory, full-color reboots of the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises made all the old gothic haunts bankable again. But the studio also dabbled in comedies, action and suspense thrillers like Hysteria , a sub-Hitchcockian story of an amnesiac who tries to piece together the circumstances behind the car crash that was responsible for his fragile mental condition. It’s obvious upfront that there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot, so the chief viewing pleasure is trying to sort out exactly who is responsible: the innocent nurse, concerned psychiatrist, mysterious femme fatale…or all three? Director Freddie Francis is responsible for some of the most visually sumptuous films ever made. This isn’t one of them. Hysteria is a perfectly flat and dull looking affair, that really only comes alive when bit player Maurice Denham enters the story as a surprisingly street smart priva...

Roger Corman has been responsible for somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 films as a writer, director or producer. Little wonder Shout Factory has resorted to packaging his films as a Quadruple Feature in their latest release Vampires, Mummies & Monsters . This 2-disc special edition sports some pretty obscure titles picked for release by Roger when he started his own company – New World – in the early ‘70s. Lady Frankenstein (1972) is the most interesting, with a classy Hammer Films approach that mixes gothic horror with sex, sadism and necrophilia. Carrying on her father’s work, Tania Frankenstein (Rosalba Neri) takes things to a whole new level of deceiptful depravity, crafting a creature not just out of scientific curiousity, but also to satisfy her physical desires. The Velvet Vampire (1971) has a good time exploring the dark side of the free-love generation’s loose morals, with a young married couple seduced by a swinging vampiress. A good deal of unintentional hum...

It might have been hard to be a Charlton Heston fan at the tail end of his career: polyester and politics will sully almost anyone’s reputation. But during the late ‘50s, he was a close as a movie star could get to God…literally. After playing Moses in The Ten Commandments , Heston followed up his Biblical performance with another religious epic, Ben Hur , the most expensive movie ever produced at the time. Director William Wyler’s film wound up winning eleven Academy Awards (a record that still holds today, tied with Titanic and The Return of the King ) and cementing Heston’s reputation as the go-to guy for studio tent-pole pictures. But Ben Hur is far from a creaky historical record of Hollywood’s golden years; it’s an action-packed, monumental cinematic achievement that served as the model for filmmakers half a century later. The Chariot Sequence alone is the stuff of legend. Utilizing multiple cameras and taking over five weeks to film, the stunts still pack a punch, all ...

After Bernard Goetz shot four muggers in an NYC subway in 1984, most of the life went out of the vigilante movies. It was much more fun to fantasize about old pros like Charles Bronsan punishing criminals with extreme prejudice than to swallow the idea of Goetz - a nerdy, bespectacled milquetoast - as a defender of justice. Reality, and the surrounding controversy, threw cold water in the face of what had been a cinematic hot topic. But The Exterminator (1980) was prescient in at least one respect: its hero (or anti -hero) is just as harmless and frumpy looking as Goetz. John Eastland (Robert Ginty) looks about as dangerous as a high-school English teacher, but after his buddy from the ‘Nam is viciously mugged he tracks down the punks responsible and makes them pay. Not content to stop there, John metes out justice to a whole lineup of gangsters, perverts and street punks, becoming a media sensation. The Exterminator was a staple on the shelf of every “mom & pop” video s...

Low-budget horror hit a peak in the 70’s with films like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes breaking the barriers of good taste and the heretofore predictable rules of scary movies audiences came to expect. These were the pioneers of the “anti-Hollywood” horror movie. Despite its rabid cult following, Hills isn’t the most accomplished film of Wes Craven’s career. The editing is clumsy, the acting is weak and the make-up is corny (actor Michael Berryman’s misshapen bald skull makes him the only convincing inbred hick in the bunch). At best, Hills is a jury-rigged minor masterpiece, held together by sheer brute force and an overwhelming sense of dread. The film feeds off the momentum of its stripped down story about a family of whitebread vacationers fighting for survival in the desert against a family of cannibalistic madmen (and women). The set-piece scene - and the one that likely earned the film its reputation - is a disturbingly violent at...