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Providing a shaky bridge between modern horror classics like Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist , Willard (1971) was a surprise hit in 1971, dropping the traditional supernatural scares and kickstarting the "animal attack" genre that would run rampant throughout the decade. But it's the film's soft-sell approach that helped it go mainstream, substituting honest-to-gosh emotions in place of grindhouse-style gore. Willard (played to perfection by a young Bruce Davison) is a bit of a pushover, allowing his boss, Mr. Martin (Ernest Borgnine) to work him all hours and his mother (Elsa Lanchester) to smother him with nagging affection. After running across a nest of rats in the backyard, Willard develops a close relationship with the cuddly rodents, particularly a black and white pair he names Ben and Socrates respectively. His new friends are quick learners and big eaters. With tax payments looming and his job on the line, Willard soon realizes that his rat...

It's safe to say that pandering to '80s nostalgia has gone mainstream. Everything from TV shows ( The Goldbergs ) to streaming events ( Stranger Things ) to pizza commercials (Ferris Buehler lived in Chicago, people, he would never order from Dominos!) is coated with day-glo residue of pop culture references and one-hit wonders. Released in 2001, well before the retro resurgence was even due to arrive, Donnie Darko uses the '80s as a colorful backdrop for its story of a troubled teen on the edge of full-blown paranoid schizophrenia...who also holds the fate of the world in his hands. Or not. The beauty of director Richard Kelly's film is that it doesn't hand out easy answers for its interconnected theories of time travel, spiritual plans, invisible friends and intangible jellyfish sprouting out of everyone's chest. It's a sort of sci-fi-afterschool-special that manages to treat mental illness with some real emotional weight and also get a laug...

Bracketed between a career full of beautiful, but often erotically offensive films, Walerian Borowczyk returned to his native Poland in 1975 to film The Story of Sin , a faithful and relatively demure adaptation of the novel by Stefan Zeromski, which details the romantic, moral and spiritual struggles of Ewa Pobratynska, a virginal innocent whose obsession with a married lodger that moves into the family home leads her astray from the church, her family and her own dignity. Yes, this is the same director responsible for The Beast (1975), one of the most ridiculously sexually explicit fairy tales ever filmed, and who continued pursued his obsession with genitalia into the horror genre with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981). Borowczyk apologists seem to be able to look beyond his rather grotesque fascinations, admiring the craft that lies underneath. And The Story of Sin is one of the few feature films that support their argument. Ewa believes she's found...

The literary equivalent of hiding back issues of Playboy under your bed, author Grace Metalious' novel Peyton Place (1957) provided illicit thrills and sexual instruction for an entire generation of erotically curious teens during the '50s. Glued to the bestseller list for 59 weeks, its popularity all but guaranteed the story of passion, sex, incest and murder would be adapted to the screen; the only question was, how much of its racy content would remain? Producer Jerry Wald managed to work around most of the crumbling Hayes Code restrictions while still putting out a firecracker of a film that not only found financial success but also earned nine Academy Award nominations to boot. The film revolves around the sheltered life of Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who finds the constrictive community of Peyton Place - and her own mother, Constance (Lana Turner) in particular - to be creatively and emotionally stifling. Curious about boys but barred from dating, she strikes ...

Just as music fans flocked to vinyl for improved fidelity and collateral coolness, the past decade has seen cineastes celebrating just about every movie made in Korea. And in many cases, the praise is well deserved. From small emotional stories like Sunny (2011) and costume epics like Masquerade (2012), Korean filmmakers have proven they can do anything Hollywood can...and is some cases much better. But it's genre films that have gotten the most exposure, one-upping American monster movies and action flicks with a creative energy lacking in the stuff produced stateside. Even Tunnel (2016), a fairly typical twist on the disaster / survival story, drills down to make a personal impact, rather than relying on special effects to carry the load. Driving through a newly completed tunnel on his way home from work, Jung-soo (Jung-woo Ha) is trapped beneath a literal mountain of rubble, kept safe beneath the fragile shell of his Kia. With a working cell phone, two bottles of water an...

As film historian Julie Kirgo points out in the liner notes for Twilight Time's limited edition Blu-ray of 1967's How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying , by the time Shepherd Mead's original book made it from print to stage to screen, the times they were-a-changing. What was once a spot-on skewering of office politics - and the advertising industry in particular - had become dated, sexist and safe. And the musical itself - one of the studio system's most reliable widgets - was about to be pulled off the assembly line. But, in true capitalistic spirit, if you wait long enough just about everything comes back into fashion. And How To Succeed plays now as a much trendier throwback to mod fashions, swinging set design and enjoyably old fashioned assumptions about the opposite sex...no matter which gender you identify with. A window-washer with aspirations, J. Pierpont Finch (Robert Morse) stumbles upon a "How-To" book that catapults him from t...

One of the crowning achievements of "V-Cinema," the Japanese direct-to-video market that peaked in the mid-90s, Dead or Alive and its two sequels paired the reigning kings of the action genre, Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa, in a loosely-connected trilogy of hard-boiled action references, yakuza family drama and apocalyptic martial arts. Working with no creative restraints, other than the proscribed low-budgets, director Takashi Miike's "anything-goes" filmmaking philosophy is a dazzling mix of black humor and shock tactics with an over-arcing theme of the importance of human relationships...even between people who aren't human to begin with. Opening with a breathless montage of brutal exposition, DOA (1999) sets the stage immediately for Miike's particular brand of gangster movie. Ryu is an ambitious outsider using his "heroic" status in the underground immigrant community to shoot his way to the top of the Yakuza ladder. Detective Jojim...

Once the slasher genre had run its course, the next logical evolution of the horror film was comedy. Besides clearing hurdles with the MPAA, it opened the door to an entirely new audience that had seemingly become immune to teenagers skewered after having sex. No one knew this better than producer Sean S. Cunningham, whose Friday the 13th franchise finally became self-aware with the sixth chapter by adding a much-needed dose of humor. And that same year, 1986, Cunningham and director Steve Miner had even more sleeper success with their horror-comedy hybrid House , starring William Katt as a horror novelist whose family-life goes to hell after moving into his Aunt's creepy estate. Roger Cobb (Katt) is a Stephen King-style super author facing writer's block after the disappearance of his young son. In an attempt to get the creative juices flowing, Roger moves into the same house where his child vanished, switching gears to write a more personal story about his traumatic e...

Produced three years before Dr. No changed the spy thriller forever - and only a few months after Castro's revolution - Our Man in Havana (1959) is an entirely different sort of cloak-and-dagger affair. Bitingly satirical of the British secret service and cleverly playful towards the genre as a whole, Graham Green's script finds the perfect personification of Hitchcock's "Man Who Knew Too Much (or, in this case, too little ) in Alec Guinness, a mild-mannered vacuum salesman recruited by MI6 to become a spy for Queen and country. But what begins as a lark to make extra cash winds up coming with a hefty bill to pay. Jim Wormold (Guinness) is content enough with his dwindling customer base in pre-revolutionary Cuba, but his blossoming daughter has attracted the attention of an infamous local official, Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs). So when a rather conspicuous British agent (Noel Coward) offers $150 a month in exchange for setting up a network of fellow informants, ...

In Property Is No Longer A Theft (1973), Italian filmmaker Elio Petri lays out his socio-political agenda in almost Shakespearean terms: "To be or to have?" And his cultural condemnation of the evils of capitalism has only become more razor-sharp in the 44 years since the film's release, which never garnered as much attention as his more celebrated efforts like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion . With a dense cinematic text and admittedly unpopular Marxist mindset, the film could have been a slog on both sides of the argument. But Petri, working at the height of his creative powers, delivers a whirlwind of biting black comedy and social commentary, taking aim right at the heart of Man's most tangible temptation: money . Total (Flavio Bucci) is an unstable bank-teller with an allergy to the currency of his profession; even the sight of paper money makes him itch uncontrollably. But this physical manifestation becomes an emotional obsession when he c...