Movieline Online

A successful international exploitation artist, Ovidio G. Assonitis never met a movie he couldn't make a quick buck off of...especially if there was an even more successful movie to use as a springboard. As a producer / director he crafted his own take on The Exorcist (1974's Beyond the Door ), Jaws (1977's Tentacles ) and even an unofficial sequel to Piranha (1981's Piranha 2: The Spawning ) on which he hired then fired director James Cameron. Probably the least notable is Madhouse , produced the same year, which is a bit of a kitchen sink giallo with elements of The Shining and a decade worth of slasher movies rolled into one. But of all the films mentioned, it's probably the most slick and cohesive of the bunch, lifting disparate batch of second-hand horror clichés - devil dogs, deformed siblings and family curses - into an often confounding but gleefully entertaining watch. Julia (Trish Everly) and her emotionally abuse identical twin, Helen, haven...

In the 1960s, the Japanese film industry pumped out product at a record pace. Movies were sequelized and serialized like popular mangas of the time, creating multiple ongoing franchises for each studio. Brutal Tales of Chivalry (1965) was the first in a string of yakuza stories set during the Showa era (in this case a ruined post-war suburb of Tokyo) where society struggled to rebuild itself in a new image, one that balanced the inherent temptations of capitalism with the traditional rules of honor ingrained in Japanese culture. Shinji (Ken Takakura), a member of the Kozu family, returns home from the war to a community in crisis. His old boss, struggling to keep the peace between rival yakuza gangs who control good and services supplied to the locals, is murdered for his efforts, passing on the leadership role to Shinji with a nearly untenable caveat that he not retaliate for any wrongs committed against them. Meanwhile the Shinsei gang moves forward with building a new marketpl...

Joe Dellesandro was a perfect fit for the Warhol factory's foray into feature films. His androgynous looks and junkie physique were embodied the glam-rock era mixed with a seedy street-level authenticity you just couldn't fake. After a moderate success with Paul Morrissey's back-to-back horror films Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula , Dellesandro was "farmed out" so to speak for other European producers looking to take advantage of his American underground cache. The Climber is a rather traditional Italian gangster story of an ambitious young thug, Aldo (Dellesandro), with dreams of toppling the local bosses and starting an organization of his own. Of course, as a foreigner in a country where "family" means everything, the odds are against his success. But Aldo pushes his way into the local clubs and restaurants, demanding protection payments and horning in on drug trade. Eventually, he and his upstart band of followers intimidate th...

Released at the tail end of the '70s, Who'll Stop the Rain is wrapped up in the iconography of the era: Vietnam, drugs, and the slow, sad demise of the peace & love generation. But the plot itself pushes a much more straightforward action movie agenda. Working off the novel Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, Nick Nolte gets his first real slam dunk role as Ray Hicks, an ex-marine whose return to the land of the free leaves him feeling more trapped than ever before. With the war winding down, photographer John Converse (Michael Moriarty) sees an opportunity in the drug trade, graduating from grass to smack and asking his old buddy Ray to smuggle it back to the U.S. where his wife, Marge (Tuesday Weld) will be waiting with payment. Unfortunately, Marge is saddled with a habit of her own and is completely taken by surprise at her husband's new business plan. So when a dirty cop plans to take the shipment for himself, Ray and Marge hit the road to try and unload the dru...

Just about every modern review of 1991's The Man in the Moon will begin with mentioning the acting debut of Reese Witherspoon. And they should. As much talent as the rest of the cast and crew bring to the table, it's Witherspoon who runs away with the film, making her coming-of-age performance seem effortlessly honest, charming and bittersweet. But now that the actress has proven she has what it takes for the long haul, we can focus on the other elements of director Robert Mulligan's film that put her in a position to succeed. A tomboy caught at that precarious age of 14, Dani Trant (Witherspoon) admires all the attention her pretty older sister, Maureen, attracts from the boys...but is still enjoying all the innocent fun to be had in 1957 rural Louisiana. Her priorities change when the older boy next door, Court (Jason London), sparks an immediate romantic connection. Unfortunately, it's a bit one-sided, as Court refuses to commit to a relationship with someo...

Even a legend has his off days. And William Goldman's long, long gestating original script for Year of the Comet (1992), ostensibly an action-packed, globe-trotting romance when written, aged into a derivative, sexist mess by the time it was given a greenlight. Certainly some of the blame lies in the casting of Tim Daly, a competent TV actor when being a TV actor wasn't cool. But most of the fault lies in Goldman's sitcom-style romantic suspense between Daly and co-star Penelope Ann Miller, a mousey sommelier who gets swept off her feet by a dashing troubleshooter as they protect a priceless bottle of wine. On her first assignment for her father's auction house, Margaret Harwood (Miller) stumbles upon an oversized bottle of unique vintage in the basement of a rented castle. Unfortunately, the castle is being rented by a trio of evil genetic researchers (led by actor Louis Jourdan) whose secret formula for eternal youth is hidden in the crate in which Margaret...

Director Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) might be one of the most iconic and imitated horror films you've never heard of. His follow-up, Spotlight on a Murderer (1961) seems less influential on the surface; but this quirky murder / mystery winds up right in the thick of a gothic renaissance that spread through Italy and Germany, leading up to the more explicit gialli cycle of black-gloved killers. Here we have a much more typical, but playfully clever, whodunit built around a cast of familial suspects bickering over a delayed inheritance. Upon his death, Count Herve de Keraudren crawls inside a secret room in his sprawling castle, thereby depriving his heirs of an official corpse and delaying the transfer of his assets five years. Gathered together in frustration, the surviving family members come up with a plan to pay for the immense costs of running the estate while they wait: put on a show built around the legend of a doomed love triangle that occurred ri...

Charles Bronson made 25 movies over the course of one decade - 1970 to 1980 - cementing his status as one of the premiere tough guys in cinematic history. While he often patrolled the same city streets and dusty cow towns as rival star Clint Eastwood , whose Dirty Harry installments served as a template for the post-Western action film genre, Bronson was even more of a minimalist when it came to his onscreen performances. To his critics (then and now) the actor was sleepwalking through undemanding roles. But to his fans, each laconic line delivery and squinty stare spoke volumes. The Stone Killer (1973), Bronson’s third consecutive collaboration with director Michael Winner (they'd finally hit pay dirt the next year with Death Wish) is far from either man's best work. A seemingly random concoction of ingredients pulled from popular hits like The Godfather and Dirty Harry - although it's based on a British novel - the film leaves a trail of stranded characters ...

Let's be honest, most 3D movies from the original '50s boom would be worthless without the gimmick of monsters, explosions or curvy space babes coming out of the screen. That's not to denigrate their entertainment value; but taken as a whole, the films were designed to take advantage of the latest fad, not to stand the test of time. There are certainly exceptions to the rule, and Inferno (1953) is one of them. Starring Robert Ryan as a spoiled millionaire left for dead in the desert by his cheating wife and her lover, the film is just as tense and exciting in two-dimensions as it is in three. The script cuts right to the chase - or getaway in this case - as Geraldine Carson (Rhonda Fleming) covers her tracks with help from new beau, Joseph Duncan (William Lundigan), erasing all signs of their path down the mountain where her husband, Donald Whitley Carson III (Ryan), has been left with a broken leg. As the duo arrive back in town, blaming Carson's disappearanc...

If you think American politics are a mess, just try and make sense of the chaos that took place in Italy in the '70s and '80s. Corruption, collusion and power struggles resulted in the high profile assassinations of judges, many of whom were the sole line of defense in a burgeoning war against terrorism and the Mafia, men who gave up their lives as a surrogate for the weak political will of their country. OK, history lesson over...but it's an essential part of appreciating director Francesco Rosi's Three Brothers (1981), a film based on the work of Russian novelist Andrei Platonov, but predominantly concerned with Italian politics of the day. The death of their mother brings Raffaele, Rocco and Nicola back together to their small farming village in southern Italy, where their father, Donato, is planning the funeral. Out of touch with each other and the simple lives they left behind, each man brings along their fair share of emotional baggage. Nicola is frustrate...