Movieline Online

Although the ‘80s are often dismissed as yielding a rather bland crop of Hollywood movies, what the decade lacked in style in more than made up for in storytelling. Nestled between the edgy indies and the overblown action flicks were a wide variety of quiet period dramas ( Driving Miss Daisy, Room with a View , Distant Voices, Still Lives) whose emotional stakes ran just as high as the competition…but were produced on a much smaller cinematic scale. 82 year-old director Yoji Yamada, responsible for more than 82 movies over the course of his career, brings that rare sort of personal yet accessible filmmaking full circle with The Little House (2014), telling the story of a young housemaid, Taki Nunomiya, better known as “Taki Dear” to the Hirai family with whom she’s employed in 1930’s Tokyo. The woman of the house, Tokiko Hirai, is a stylish young wife and mother thankful for the companionship that her work-obsessed husband isn’t willing to provide. Outside of their red-tiled mode...

Finding a good spaghetti western has become as difficult as finding good Italian food. There are so many options out there you have spend as much time researching your choices as you do enjoying them…or risk settling for Olive Garden . That’s when it pays to get a good recommendation. And Arrow Films has already presented us with a couple of choice titles (including Day of Anger and Cemetery Without Crosses ) that had little name recognition outside of fan circles. Their latest, Requiescant (1967) is, thankfully, more of the same. A revenge story with overt spiritual and political overtones, the movie begins with the massacre of an entire pueblo of Mexicans who’d parlayed for a truce with ruthless Texas aristocrat George Ferguson (Mark Damon). The lone survivor is a young boy with no memory of the event. But 20 years later, fate find the now young man (nameless but for the Requiescant nickname) butting heads with Ferguson again after his adopted sister becomes a prisoner pro...

The 1970s were a huge decade for horror on the big screen, spawning iconic masterpieces like The Exorcist along with killer franchises ( Halloween, Texas Chainsaw ) that still linger on. But it was a big decade on the small screen as well, most notably thanks to the work of producer Dan Curtis whose vampire soap opera Dark Shadows led to a number of movie-of-the-week chillers and spooky TV series spin-offs. Burnt Offerings (1976) is not one of them. The film was Curtis’ sole anomalous theatrical release amongst a string of made-for-television productions, although shot in a flat, foggy episodic TV-style. And it attracted one heck of a cast, including Oliver Reed, Karen Black and the legendary Bette Davis, playing house in a ramshackle mansion that harbors a secret passed down from one generation to the next. Ben and Marian Rolf (Reed and Black) get a suspiciously good deal on their summer rental, which turns out to be a large estate complete with swimming pool and greenhouse...

From the pulpy movie poster to its tough-guy leading man, The Satan Bug (1965) feels less like an apocalyptic disaster movie and more like an ambitious mystery novel. Director John Sturges followed up his epic WWII adventure The Great Es c a pe with this much more compact story of a secret germ warfare lab robbed of one of its most potent concoctions. Hot on the trail of the titular airborne virus, which could wipe out all life on Earth within a few weeks, is investigator Lee Barrett (George Maharis) who suspects the heist was an inside job. But time is running short as staged “events” leave hundreds of dead bodies behind as proof of the terrorists’ very real threat. With the entire city of Los Angeles targeted next, Barrett must track down each vial before time runs out on us all. Even though the script calls for a global catastrophe and more than a few suspenseful action sequences, most of The Satan Bug is confined to laboratories, offices and meeting rooms. The impressive b...

For cult movie fans, Mark Harley’s 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, was like a can’t-miss playlist of new favorites they didn’t even know existed. Ripping through the history of the Australian exploitation genre of the ‘70s and ‘80s with excitement and affection, the only bummer was most of the films featured were still unavailable on home video. But each year more Ozploitation finds its way on Blu-ray and DVD, the latest being the infamous Turkey Shoot (1982), a hot mess of a sci-fi prison movie that features inmates being hunted for the sport of the corrupt political elite. Nonsensical and comically violent, director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s ( Dead End Drive-In ) film was stripped of a large portion of its budget and fifteen pages of script only two weeks before filming was to begin. What remains is an anything-goes montage of beatings, explosions, dismemberments and toe-eating monsters. It’s not the sort of film one defends as high art. But its commitment to delivering t...

1994 was the year of Pulp Fiction . Oh sure, audiences also showed up in droves for Forrest Gump, The Lion King and a live-action version of The Flintstones . But within the burgeoning world on independent cinema, there was a new king of the mountain. Which was really piss poor timing for John Dahl’s The Last Seduction , a sexy, neo-noir thriller that got good reviews but was steamrolled by the Tarantino juggernaut. Dahl certainly wasn’t reinventing cinema. In fact his next project, Unforgettable (1996), seemed to embrace the wham-bam, B-movie aesthetic studios used to crank out in the ‘50s starring second-tier actors caught up in lurid paperback-inspired plots. Only this time, the gimmick involves a bit of far-fetched pharmacological invention that transfers the memories of a suspected killer into the mind of the man framed for the same murder. David Krane (Ray Liotta) is a whip-smart assistant medical examiner assigned to a multiple homicide convenience store shoot-out. At ...

Summer Lovers (1982) isn’t deserving of any serious film criticism or retrospectives. But that doesn’t mean this breezy, carefree (and mostly clothes -free) ode to early ‘80s sexual adventurousness isn’t worth watching, especially from a 30-plus year perspective. Writer / director Randal Kleiser ( Grease ) points his camera at the Greek Isles, their white-washed villas and black-sand beaches invaded by 24-hour party people in full Dionysian frenzy, with vistas worthy of a National Geographic documentary. But the landscapes are only a backdrop for his careful – and rarely corny – exploration of a ménage a trois between a timid American couple and their more worldly local lover. Michael (Peter Gallagher) and Cathy (Daryl Hannah) arrive in Greece hoping to rekindle the spark in their relationship. Unfortunately, Michael makes sparks with Lina (Valerie Quennessen), a French archeologist who exudes a sexual freedom that Cathy sorely lacks. After Michael owns up to the affair, Cathy c...

Film is not only the most effective art form at chronicling social change; it’s also the most adept at inspiring it. And there’s little doubt that that was the agenda behind Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? , which confronted the conflicting generational attitudes regarding interracial relationships in a way that the stodgy news media and well-meaning protests could not. With cinematic royalty like Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn involved, this was a shot fired over the bow of most American’s view of race relations, yet presented in such a way that its liberal politics meshed perfectly with classic Hollywood dinner party comedy. After a ten-day courtship, freewheeling Joey (Katharine Houghton) brings back Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier) to meet her a parents, Matt and Christina Drayton (Tracy and Hepburn), and announce their impending nuptials only a short week away. Despite the Drayton’s liberal leanings, the situation comes as a shock, especially when ...

Even if one is able to separate Woody Allen’s personal life from his professional one, the majority of his films are categorically divisive. Not in the political or sociological sense. It’s purely about the jokes; you either get ‘em or you don’t. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is one of Allen’s final stabs at the free-form ensemble farce, produced in 1982 and marking the first appearance of Mia Farrow in his ever-expanding cinematic universe. Taking equal inspiration from Shakespeare and Ingmar Bergman with a predictably Borscht Belt bent, the film gathers three couples for a weekend in the country that turns into a partner-swapping debacle of ‘70s sitcom proportions. Sexually troubled couple Andrew (Allen) and his wife (Mary Steenburgen) play host to the soon-to-be-married Leopold (Jose Ferrer), a pretentious professor pushing seventy, and the much younger Ariel (Farrow), who Andrew let slip away a decade earlier and now pursues with puerile vengeance. Also in the running for...