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In 1978, the same year Christopher Walken would rise to national prominence in The Deer Hunter , he also starred in an odd, wandering western tale as Mr. Rainbow, a bounty hunter with a heart of gold who becomes the de facto protector of an indentured servant (Margot Kidder, starring in Superman the same year as well) while on a hunt for Montezuma’s gold. A thesis project for director David Leeds – who dropped out of UCLA to complete it – Shoot the Sun Down is an unfortunate mess that probably never should have made it to theaters. But 36 years later, it does capture everything about Walken that makes him such a unique actor and so much fun to watch on screen…even when he’s dressed up like the world’s most uncomfortable cowboy. The film was originally released as Sante Fe 1836 , a reference to the Alamo, which pops as a throwaway joke in the finale. But under any title Leeds’ film is a collection of western clichés cut together with no rhyme or reason. Scenes fade to black just...

Anthology films are like a Chinese buffet: no matter how poor the quality, you’re bound to find something you like. Body Bags (1993), Showtime’s one-shot answer to HBO’s successful Tales from the Crypt series, is actually more like a sit-down restaurant. Director John Carpenter ( Halloween ) serves as our horror host through three creepy, comic and gruesome stories filled with genre icon cameos and inside-jokes. In “The Gas Station” a woman’s first night behind the cash register turns into a fight for survival against a serial killer. Segment two stars Stacy Keach as a balding middle-aged man whose miracle cure backfires when his own follicles run rampant. And in the finale, “Eye,” Mark Hamill plays a minor leaguer whose eye transplant has him seeing ghostly visions of murder, mayhem and death. None of stories in Body Bags are strong enough to stand on their own. So it’s a good thing they’re not really designed to. John Carpenter himself directs the first two and also plays ...

Mindwarp , a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi gore film produced by Fangoria Magazine in 1992, is a cup half-full, cup half-empty proposition. In the plus column, it stars Bruce Campbell ( The Evil Dead ) and Angus Scrimm (Phantasm ), two genre icons who give it their all no matter how low-budget or poorly conceived the film around them happens to be. And despite being the brainchild of a publication dedicated to glorifying the grossest moments in movie history, the film surprisingly chooses to emphasize ideas over shock effects. Yet there’s no mistaking Mindwarp for anything other than an ambitious copycat slogging through the direct-to-video ditches. And it’s an odd release choice for Twilight Time, who usually focus on lesser known but more widely respected classics from studio back catalogs. But for those with an affection for the material - or Bruce Campbell in particular, who never quite got a fair chance at being a big-screen action hero - this blu-ray debut will likely be an u...

Ostensibly The Other (1972) could be lumped in with several other “bad seed” movies that popped up during the ‘70s like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen . But writer Thomas Tryon’s screenplay (based on his own novel) differs from those successful films in two very significant ways: 1) It’s told almost exclusively from a child’s perspective and 2) The guy with the pointy horns and forked tail is nowhere in sight. It’s the former that plays the biggest role in the film’s structure. In a movie about keeping secrets, Tryon’s script struggles to keep a real whopper under wraps until about the one-hour mark. Up until then, The Other could pass for an elegiac coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of bucolic rural America just before the onset of WW2. The idea of true “evil” arising in such an unlikely setting is one of the film’s greatest assets. Twins Niles and Holland Perry (played by Chris & Martin Udvarnoky) are flip sides of the same coin; Niles being the ...

The success of the original Django in 1966 prompted a flood of unofficial sequels overseas, many of them simply slapping “Django” on the poster even though there were no characters with that name in the film. It was marketing by association, pure and simple. Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) at least gets the name right but isn’t a direct sequel either, which one supposes is part of the post-modern charm. What’s more surprising is that history did not repeat itself this time around. Meaning even though there’s a stockpile of Django films in some Raiders of the Lost Ark -style warehouse waiting to see the light of day on home video, very few companies were quick to capitalize on the name recognition. Raro Video is a bit late to the party with their release of Hanging for Django , but it exemplifies all the aforementioned qualities of a latter-day Django imitator. As directed by Sergio Garonne, the film is much more in line with Leone’s revisionist Westerns starring Clint E...

Warner Brothers’ 1946 thriller The Beast with Five Fingers is the first notable film featuring a “disembodied hand” as the main menace. It’s a tough act to pull off, which is why most other hands going solo have played it for laughs ( The Addam’s Family, Evil Dead 2 ) rather than straight-up scares. Here, a famous pianist’s only functioning appendage appears to seek revenge after death by strangling those interfering with the details of his final will and testament. Peter Lorre, who’d already dealt with murderous limbs in Mad Love , seems to know something he’s not sharing with the rest of the potential victims. Had Beast with Five Fingers been produced at Universal, who specialized in straightforward tales of the supernatural, it likely would have lost much of its psychological subtlety. Warner goes the classy route (well, as classy as a disembodied hand can be ) and turns the film into a The Old Dark House mystery, making it fairly obvious that the hand is being “directed” by...

One of Britain’s 39 prosecuted “video nasties” from the 1984 Video Recording Act which had authorities raiding video stores nationwide to prevent the warping of impressionable young minds, House on Straw Hill (1976) actually earns much it’s torrid reputation…unlike more obviously absurd films like Zombie and Blood Feast which also made the list. Starring Udo Kier ( Suspiria ) and Linda Hayden ( Taste the Blood of Dracula ) in a sexually charged standoff at an isolated country estate, there are plenty of crude attempts to titillate, but also an intriguingly twisted mystery underneath the filth. Author Paul Martin (Kier) is struggling to complete the follow-up to his bestselling first novel. The arrival of an attractive hired secretary, Linda, (Hayden) speeds up the writing process, but distracts him with lustful thoughts and, ultimately, sexual frustration. It soon becomes obvious that Linda has a secret agenda; one that includes manipulating Martin and his drop-in lover (played b...

While the major studios do a fairly good job of documenting their own movie history, it’s up to niche companies like Blue Underground to unearth cinema’s seedier footnotes like Snuff (1976), which inspired a good share of controversy from anti-violence protestors and even prompted an official FBI investigation into the rumors surrounding real-life murders captured on film. Purchased for $5000 by producer Allan Shackleton, Snuff began as a slapdash production from the filmmaking team of Roberta and Michael Findlay called Slaughter . Filmed in Argentina with a plot mixing Mason family-style murders with South American melodrama, there is little to recommend about the first hour and fifteen minutes (despite director Nicolas Winding Refn’s appreciation of its “rock ‘n rock aesthetic” included in the extras). But Shackleton’s 10-minute coda, filmed five years after the fact, made all the marketing difference. As the final scene of Slaughter fades, we widen out to reveal the filmmaker...

As performers go, there are no more icons of horror at work today. Actors like Karloff, Lugosi, Lee and Cushing were pigeonholed, much to their distress, as masters of the macabre and allowed to do little else but dress up – or combat - one monster after another for decades. It was a living. But many of them found more resentment than enjoyment in their elevated status amongst genre fans that grew up idolizing their work on-screen. Not so for Vincent Price. Arguably the most erudite performer in the pantheon of classic horror films, the actor always seemed to relish his role as a twisted torturer, mad scientist, devil worshipper or vicious villain…whatever the case may be. But he also appreciated his status within cinema history. Rather than rebelling against his title as the “king of horror,” he accepted his accolades with open arms. And that fan-pleasing attitude is on full display in Scream Factory’s new blu-ray box set, The Vincent Price Collection , which includes six of...