Movieline Online

Now that we've reached the point of zombie oversaturation, it's fun to look back at the undead's humble beginnings. Long before Romero's "ghouls" were re-animated in 1969 ostensibly due to a crashed satellite, Invisible Invaders (1959) combined sci-fi and shambling corpses in amusingly cut-rate fashion in a story of transparent moon men who inhabit the bodies of the recently deceased to stage a takeover of the planet Earth. Apparently mankind's recent nuclear shenanigans are a clear and present danger to the invaders, who send in horror icon John Carradine, whose character, a famous nuclear scientist, is blown up in the opening credits but returns from the dead to act as the aliens' ombudsman. B-movie stalwart John Agar stars as a military man escorting a team of scientists to their underground bunker in an attempt to come up with a counterattack while the zombified masses burn down cities and cause general mass destruction. It's an inter...

The evolution of the western is the stuff scholarly studies are made of, but somehow The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) rarely earns a mention. Despite being nominated for Best Picture and starring the legendary Henry Fonda, director William A. Wellman's film just seems to slip between the cracks of cinema history even though it's unrelentingly dark subject matter was a crucial turning point for the genre. In a classic case of bad timing, ranchers Gil (Fonda) and Art (Harry Morgan) arrive in a quiet Nevada town just as all hell is about to break loose. Word reaches the saloon about the murder of another local rancher at the hands of outlaw rustlers and soon a lynching party is formed to make sure the wheels of justice turn quickly. Gil and Art begrudgingly join the posse, which soon comes up three men who not only fit the description but also are carrying the dead man's gun. And yet the idea of hanging men without a fair trial, despite the overwhelming evidence, doesn...

Has internet porn brought us to such a cultural and sociological low point that we're now nostalgic for the days of Cinemax late-night skin flicks? Apparently so. How else do you explain the release of Sorceress , a butt-smacking, toe-sucking template for exactly the sort of pay-tv shenanigans that kept dads up until all hours with one nervous finger on the remote control? This isn't vintage erotica or edgy art-house fare. It's just boobs of ridiculous sizes. Those in the know will point out the players involved (director Jim Wynorski along with stars Linda Blair and Julie Strain) have a rabid fan base and cinematographer Gary Graver earned some recent notoriety attempting to piece together Orson Welles unreleased final film, The Other Side of the Wind (although he paid the bills shooting titles like Countess Dracula's Orgy of Blood ). Still, there's no point in attempting to pass the film off as anything more than a sexy soft-core play on 1962's clas...

The information age has wreaked havoc on the traditional horror movie. Unexplored corners of the world always had the potential for cultural bogeymen that were just waiting to prey on unsuspecting white folks ( White Zombie, I Walked With A Zombie and Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow being the most voodoo-centric). But now that even the most isolated cannibal tribes probably post their meals on Facebook, it's hard to pull off the fish-out-of-water scenario convincingly. But The Other Side of the Door gives it the 'ol college try, working with a family of transplanted Americans living in India trying to deal with the death of their son, Oliver. Maria (Sarah Wayne Callies of The Walking Dead ) blames herself choosing to pull her daughter from the sinking vehicle (the crash itself is never explained) and leaving her son to drown. And when her depression turns suicidal, the family's Indian housekeeper tells her of a forbidden temple that will allow her to ...

Say what you will about producer Harry Alan Towers (various reports claim him to be a high-class pimp, a Soviet spy or both! ), the man knew how to sell a movie in the international marketplace: exotic locales, a little skin, sketchy literary pedigree and a few over-the-hill stars to pad the credits. With formula in hand he churned out a huge amount of second-tier adventure stories throughout the '60s with enough cross-cultural appeal that they could play almost anywhere...and still play quite well on home video, as a matter of fact. Circus of Fear is based on a mystery by Edgar Wallace, the British crime novelist whose name almost became a genre unto itself, particularly in Germany; eventually influencing the burgeoning giallo boom in Italy. The disparate plot threads (an armored car robbery, various love triangles and oaths of family vengeance) come together at the winter quarters of a traveling circus, where a murderer hides among the quirky employees. Is it the blackmaili...

Arrow Video's first Nikkatsu Diamond Guys set (review found here) was just the sort of curated film experience home video seems to be headed towards: a selection of categorically-grouped titles highlighting the Nikkatsu studio's top tier of male stars working in some fast, fun genre fare. And the second set follows an even more unexpected path of youth comedies, ensemble farce and flat-out spoofs that are a welcome treat right out of left field. Tokyo Mighty Guy (1960) leans heavily on the burgeoning generation gap to get most of its laughs. The lithely handsome Akira Kobayashi stars as Jiro, a French-speaking wannabe chef whose family restaurant is nearly destroyed when a famous ex-prime minister crashes his car into the front entrance. This sets off a chain of loosely connected problems including threats from the local "protection" squad who demand payment, a case of mistaken identity at the massage parlor and a shotgun wedding that ends in true love. Dang...

As a cinematographer Nicolas Roeg worked with some of the most influential filmmakers of the '60s. Yet when it came for him to launch his own directorial career (with 1970's Performance ) he eschewed the more formal artistic tendencies of his mentors and adopted a "broken" filmmaking style that was uniquely his own. And he stuck with it for most of his career, right through Eureka (1983), a Citizen Kane -style story of a billionaire whose family life suffers despite achieving his dream of immense wealth. At the tail end of the gold rush, Jack McCann (Gene Hackman) sniffs out one of the richest motherlodes in history, thanks to some supernatural assistance and a snowy vision quest. But his life seems to peak in that moment, turning him into a cranky recluse living on a private island in the Bahamas with his alcoholic wife (Jane Lapotaire) and his sexually adventurous daughter (Theresa Russell) whose marriage to Claude, a French playboy (Rutger Hauer), causes Mc...

It's more than a little shocking to discover that Bernard Herrmann only scored one western in his entire career: Garden of Evil (1954), an all-star affair with Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward and Richard Widmark on the run from a tribe of angry Apaches in central Mexico. And the result, which elevates director Henry Hathaway's film from a tense bit standard studio filmmaking to a nearly non-stop barrage of horns, drums and trilling trumpets, only makes one wonder why he didn't get a chance to contribute more to the genre over the years! Promising $2000 per man for the rescue of her husband from a cave-in at their gold mine, Leah (Haywayd) manages to secure four recruits: a bounty-hunter on a short fuse (Cameron Mitchell), a laconic card shark (Widmark), a gung-ho local (Victor Manuel Mendoza) and Hooker (Cooper), a soft-spoken ex-sheriff who does his best to keep the group on the straight and narrow. Between Leah's irresistible femininity and a pile of gold for the...

As one might expect from a career as lengthy as Roger Corman's, there are no shortage of colorful stories to tell. But few are as complicated and convoluted as the history behind Blood Bath (1966), a 62-minute second feature made up of no less than three other films, which set a new standard for return on investment...even by Corman's standards! It's probably best to start with the extras on Arrow Video's remarkable 2-disc set, most notably Tim Lucas' feature-length breakdown on the genesis of the film, which began as Operation Titian , an Eastern European crime-thriller which Corman commissioned but found to be unmarketable to a US audience (despite the fact that future auteur Francis Ford Coppola was in charge of the set). An abridged version was released as part of American International's TV package, entitled Portrait in Terror . But Director Jack Hill ( Spider Baby ) shot an entirely new film using bits and pieces of Titian as a backdrop for hi...