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Edgar Allen Poe peaked cinematically in the 1960s with Roger Corman's series of Vincent Price collaborations. Meanwhile, H.P. Lovecraft is still waiting for his definitive onscreen adaptation (a big budget Guillermo Del Toro project was recently nixed for budgetary reasons). The authors are often lumped into one catchall horror fiction category, although their approaches to fear are quite different. Lovecraft's existential, slimy, interdimensional monsters got their best shot at movie stardom during the '80s, particularly Stuart Gordon's From Beyond (1986), which embraced the practical latex-effects aesthetic with a vengeance. Unfortunately, we're not here to talk about that film. We're here to talk about The Curse (1987), which uses Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space as the basis for its Farm Aid-era tale of a meteor crash that leaks cosmic goo into the soil, contaminating the water supply and turning anyone or anything that drinks it into ...

Even though over 70% of the Earth is covered in water, we don't know a hell of a lot more about what's going on down there than when we first flopped up on land. Ironically, the same could be said for Japanese cinema, which harbors an almost immeasurable depth of titles that have never seen the light of day in the West. So Arrow Video's release of Nikkatsu Diamond Guys - a three film collection starring Nikkatsu Studio's most marketable leading men - should be of interest to just about anybody with an interest in the evolution of cinema. After WWII, Nikkatsu, the oldest studio in Japan, shifted its focus from historical productions to a more American-influenced slate of genre films, lifting elements from film noir, gangster and teen-angst films, hoping to create their own homegrown James Dean or Elvis. The first film in the set, Voice Without A Shadow , adds a Hitchcockian spin to its story of a telephone switchboard operator who overhears a murder in progress. ...

As we inch ever closer to the having all of Alfred Hitchcock's films available in high-definition, even the release of what many consider one of the director's lesser works is cause for celebration. 1956's The Wrong Man is a major departure from Hitch's typically stylized visual approach, constructing the film with an intentionally workmanlike presentation of the facts, yet still carrying over his common cinematic hook of an everyman pushed to the limits because of a case of mistaken identity. Based on the true story of a New York City musician, Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), mistakenly identified as a hold-up man responsible for a string of neighborhood robberies, the film follows his chilling progress through the legal system with an almost documentary-like attention to detail. Out on bail and forced to prove his innocence, Manny and his wife Rose (Vera Miles) attempt to track down an alibi with discouraging results, leading to Rose's unexpected nervous b...

Director Edward L. Cahn made 29 feature films between years 1950 and 1960, all B-movie program-fillers with a production budget about equal to the craft services tab on most major studio releases. And yet movies like It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) and Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) probably garner more attention today than in the year of their release. Arguing that Cahn is some sort of assembly-line auteur might be pushing it. But it does go to show that even in the rush-rush, rough-draft world of '50s genre filmmaking, these guys were pretty damn good at their jobs. Curse of the Faceless Man (1958) is an obvious mash-up of Universal's Mummy films and the familiar Golem story, featuring an encrusted man dug up from the ruins of Pompeii and brought back to Naples as part of a museum display. But the lifeless stone man doesn't stay lifeless for long, using his lethal fists to take revenge on the Roman Empire that had kept him as a gladiator slave and...

There's no denying stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen was a master at his craft. But the cast and crew around him weren't always working up to his high standards, resulting in films that had fantastic special effects sequences but very little else to recommend them. Mysterious Island (1961) is one of the notable exceptions. Director Cy Endfield constructs a non-stop adventure story out of Jules Verne's novel, a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , which would probably function just as well without Harryhausen's oversized creations as it does with them. Upon their escape from a Confederate prison, a group of soldiers find themselves blown across the continent in a hot air balloon only to become stranded on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. But it doesn't stay deserted long. Two women are washed ashore and join up with the party as they struggle to survive against oversized crabs, chickens and honeybees, ordinary creatures made enormous b...

Even if Joel Hodgson's crowd-sourced reboot of MST3K doesn't float your boat (the lack of the original cast is understandable but still disappointing), at the very least it means Shout Factory will have some financial incentive to continue releasing their awesome box sets, of which Volume XXIV is the latest installment focusing on four titles from American International Pictures. The set splits the episodes between two hosts and two seasons. Viking Women Vs. the Sea Serpent is a Roger Corman shoestring epic that just ripe for riffing with a cast of full-bodied females and one stowaway crossing the ocean to find their missing men-folk who've been captured by a tribe of primitive barbarians. Hosted by Joel during the 1991 season, this one takes a while to get going but winds up being a solid outing. The feature is preceded by Home Economics short from the ‘50s that is also great mocking material War of the Colossal Beast isn't just the best episode of the set,...