Movieline Online

The horror genre took a dramatic turn after the success of Rosemary's Baby (1968). Suddenly, castles, cobwebs and fangs were about as popular as three-day-old donuts. Which meant that adaptations of reliable literary authors like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft needed a fast facelift before hitting theaters. And that's exactly what this pair of AIP produced chillers got, putting a rather desperate psychedelic spin on The Dunwich Horror (1970) and turning Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971) into a Gran Guignol greatest hits. Director Daniel Haller had already taken a semi-successful crack at Lovecraft once with 1965's Die Monster Die , so he probably seemed as good a choice as any to steer the story of yet another interdimensional incursion by the "Old Ones," this time invited into our world by one Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) who plans to supernaturally impregnate a naive college girl (Sandra Dee) with the help of the infamous Necronomicon. After steal...

Although both of the films in Blue Underground's latest double feature, Code 7...Victim 5 and Mozambique , owe a huge debt to the then burgeoning James Bond franchise - which had several novels and three films under its belt by 1964 - they're also spot-on cinematic reproductions of pulp fiction private-eye stories popularized by American authors like John D. MacDonald whose heroes were less classy but equally infallible. Steve Martin (Lex Barker) is one such cool customer, hired to protect the life of a South African millionaire who is one of four potential targets "x"-ed out of a photograph of old acquaintances. What those four have in common in central the mystery Martin must solve, if he can avoid being led astray by the women of the house, including his client's sex-pot stepdaughter and a well put-together personal assistant. Helping him in the investigation is Inspector Lean (Ronald Fraser) who manages to squeeze in some police work between afternoons ...

The Italian film industry has made some excellent forgeries. In fact, in the '60s and '70s, there was no one better at spotting a cinematic trend - be it westerns, science-fiction or sex comedies - and spitting out dozens of copies with anglicized pseudonyms to flood the market. But La Bombola Di Satana is a forgery of a forgery , awkwardly pounding square pegs into round holes as the filmmakers rearrange the plot points of a traditional gothic thriller into the semblance of a stylized giallo . Yep, they're screwing up a genre they invented ! Actually the credited director, Ferruccio Casapinta, apparently left most of the creative work to others. What's pieced together is a rather tame drawing room mystery involving the inheritance of a large estate willed to Elizabeth (Erna Schurer) by her uncle. But his death has made the household staff quite nervous, including Carol, the governess, who insists that the master of the house intended to sell off everything t...

Film festivals are a peculiar movie-going experience. While the biggies like Sundance and Toronto take a secret sort of pride in discovering the next big thing , their ongoing mission remains to introduce films that would never play in a multiplex....and the vast majority of those films never do. For every Blair Witch Project* there are hundreds of titles that probably never see the silver screen again. And then there are others that seem made expressly for film festival crowds; purposefully bizarre, intentionally obtuse and supremely cocky in their quirkiness, they exist as a nothing more than giant middle finger to the cinematic establishment, movies like Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room (2015), which is best described as turning Andy Warhol loose into the Turner Classic Movies archive. The result is an absurd psychedelic jukebox set in an alternate silent cinema universe of dreams within dreams within dreams. The first trip down the rabbit hole leads to the story of a subm...

The '80s action renaissance was the last real showcase for a traditional Hollywood "star system." You had folks like Arnold and Sly at the top, Van Damme and Seagal sweating hard in second place, and home video hopefuls like Michael Dudikoff and Chow Yun-Fat bringing up the rear. Each performer brought their own special set of skills, and was rarely able - or allowed - to do anything more. That sort of pigeonholing didn't seem to bother Sho Kosugi, star of a series of progressively sillier ninja films that kicked off the decade, who finally branched out (sort of) as a DEA agent out to avenge the death of his partner in 1987's Rage of Honor . Fearing a leak inside the organization, Shiro Tanaka (Kosugi) turns in his badge and travels to Buenos Aires to hunt down the drug smugglers who killed his buddy, rather unwisely bringing his girlfriend, Jennifer (Robin Evans), along for the trip. Soon they’re fighting off hired thugs, trained ninja assassins and, in o...