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H.P. Lovecraft never had much literary success when he was alive; and his dense mythology of inter-dimensional monstrosities lurking just outside of our fragile reality proved difficult to translate cinematically as well. In fact, the very first movie adaptation, Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace (1963), disguised itself as part of the director's popular Edgar Allan Poe series, when the actual source material was loosely based on Lovecraft's story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward . But the breakout success of Re-Animator (1985) on home video twenty years later proved without a doubt that the author wasn't box-office poison after all...and filmmakers decided to give the tale of Charles Dexter Ward another go under yet another title: The Resurrected . With a modern day setting - 1991 at the time of filming - the story adds a private investigator to the mix, John March (John Terry), hired by Claire Ward (Jane Sibbett) to snoop out an explanation for her husband...

With all due respect to recent musical efforts like La La Land , there's simply nothing like the resources and talent involved in films made during the studio era, even waning years that produced 1962's remake of Rodger's and Hammerstein's State Fair , an eager-to-please extravaganza that does its best to update the aw-shucks appeal of the original with a fresh and modern approach courtesy of sex kitten Ann-Margret. Like the rest of the state of Texas, the Frake family's life seems to revolve around their annual trip to the state fair. Patriarch Abel Frank (Tom Ewell) is pampering his prize hog in hopes of winning Best in Show; eldest son Wayne (played by straight-arrow crooner Pat Boone) is racing his custom hot rod against some stiff competition; daughter Margy is waiting for a grown-up whirlwind romance while level-headed mom Melissa Frake (Alice Faye) is the glue holding them all together. And from that first day on the midway, this year's trip promi...

Rarely are foreign filmmakers able to beat Hollywood at their own game. But 1988's Amsterdamned , produced at the tail end of the slasher genre and height of the action film, manages to cram in the best aspects of both. Directed by Dick Maas ( The Lift ) with a flair for black humor, memorable characters and one-of-a-kind stunts, his film is so ridiculously entertaining that it's almost criminal there was no way to see properly until now. Bear in mind, even the most generous plot synopsis makes Maas' film sound like an ill-conceived mess; which makes it's spot-on execution all the more satisfying. Detective Eric Visser (Hube Stapel) is one of Amsterdam's top cops, but even he is hard up for an explanation in a series of gruesome murders all committed near the city's famous canals. One witness describes a "monster" crawling out of the polluted water. But it's not long before Visser narrows the possibilities down to a sociopathic scuba ...

Difficult to categorize and even harder to see since its release in 1982, The Slayer is a psychological slasher film with a pre- Nightmare on Elm Street killer that stalks its victims' dreams. Director J.S. Cardone doesn't do as much with the concept as Wes Craven managed to a few years later, but his approach is just different enough to make this one a square peg in the round hole of '80s horror. Kay (Sarah Kendall) is an artist whose recent abstract work is caused by a series of nightmares that have kept her mentally and emotionally on edge. Her husband, David (Alan McRae) suggests tagging along on a trip with her brother and his wife to an isolated island retreat. But their arrival only makes Kay more uneasy as their vacation home seems eerily similar to the landscape of her dreams. Sure enough, David and the others are soon in danger from an unseen force that roams the island, sealing their fate in exactly the same manner Kay predicted. Their survival, and he...

Art always has an agenda, even if it's simply to entertain. But the films of Sam Fuller are a bit more transparent. 1959's The Crimson Kimono offers up a paper-thin detective story that disguises a melodramatic interracial love triangle that certainly wasn't business as usual for audiences at the time. But Fuller's film never sensationalizes. In fact, the real scandal behind Joe Kojaku, a Japanese cop, falling for a witness who happens to be white, is that he steals her away from his Caucasian partner, Det. Charlie Bancroft. Investigating the case of a stripper shot dead on an L.A. street, Joe (James Shigeta) and Charlie (Glenn Corbett) follow a lead into the Japanese quarter of Los Angeles where they come upon a witness, Christine (Victoria Shaw), who draws a sketch of the suspected killer. But her skills as an artist soon put her in jeopardy and a failed attempt on her life forces Christine to move in with Joe and Charlie to their cozy apartment. A romant...

Working comfortably in his "silly" period, Woody Allen's 1972 sketch comedy adaptation of the best-selling sex manual Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* (*But were afraid to ask) is unapologetically absurd. Made up of seven short segments starring him and a cast of guest stars (Gene Wilder, Burt Reynolds and Tony Randall among them), Allen uses the format to bounce between genre spoofs and his own brand of self-deprecating humor. Mel Brooks would hit pay dirt with the same concept a few years later ( Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein ), but here Allen concocts an early version of Saturday Night Live ...with about the same ratio of comedic highs and lows. Title cards introduce each story like a chapter heading, beginning with Do Aphrodisiacs Work? - a medieval spoof starring Allen as a failed court jester trying to woo the queen out of her vintage chastity belt - and culminating with What Happens during Ejaculation? - a Fantastic Voyage send up with the ...

Although it's not a Disney film, 1973's musical adaptation of Tom Sawyer has all the earmarks of that studio's live-action output of the era including a script and songbook from Richard and Robert Sherman, the legendary composers behind classics like The Jungle Book and Mary Poppins . And while it lacks that certain extravagance the mouse house is known for, director Don Taylor's film has a loosely episodic style that works well for the material, even if Mark Twain's original story (like those reprinted by presenting sponsor Reader's Digest ) is condensed and sanitized for family friendly consumption. A precocious kid with a good soul, Tom Sawyer (played by red-headed child star Johnny Whitaker) aspires to nothing more than enjoying himself every day. Unfortunately, the strict guidelines of an education and his Aunt Polly's house rules often get in the way of goofing off with his pal Huckleberry Finn (Jeff East) and colorful local characters like ...

The Japanese film industry provided a much-needed enema for the horror genre in the new millennium. With an emphasis on old-school supernatural scares and a sense of Y2K technology dread, films like Hideo Nakata's Ringu and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001) swept through the fan community to provide an underground terror experience that the major studios weren't interested in providing. The huge success of Gore Verbinski's Ring remake changed that awful fast, and soon screens were filled with pale ghost kids capitalizing on a new sub-genre that Hollywood would soon bleed dry. But something was lost in the translation. Looking back at Kurosawa's Pulse , now on blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video, there's an experimental edge that no American director outside of David Lynch would be willing to try. A 2006 remake by Wes Crave took the general plot synopsis - ghosts invade our world through the internet - and cleared away the clutter. But Kurosawa's fil...

The creators of Re-Animator are spot-on when they attribute their film’s success to the video boom of the ‘80s – that magical era when underage kids across the country could walk into a “mom n’ pop” rental store and ogle shelf after shelf of temptingly lurid cover art, all of it promising the sort of illicit sex and gore only the new unrated video market could offer. Stuart Gordon’s debut feature, a wildly loose adaptation of a series of H.P. Lovecraft stories that combined dead-pan humor with outlandish amounts of blood, is anchored by a star-making performance from Jeffery Combs (that unjustly never turned him into a star), making Re-Animator one of the few films that lived up to the advertising on its box, pushing the limits of bad taste to the point of no return. After an over-the-top intro that expertly sets the tone for the rest of the film, Herbert West (Combs) enrolls at Miskatonic University where he rents a room from fellow med student, Dan (Bruce Abbott), who just happens to...

The western genre provides cinephiles with an almost endless amount of material to mine in search of auteurist tendencies . And at the height of its popularity, directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Sergio Leone offered plenty of evidence for a consistently recognizable style, tone and theme. But the studio system isn't build to support many unique visions, and Joseph H. Lewis, whose noirish thrillers Gun Crazy (1950) and The Big Combo (1955) are triumphs of style over substance, does his best to elevate the B-movie gunslinger flick Terror in a Texas Town , an otherwise clumsy western revenge story penned by none of than blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Hired by a gluttonous businessman, McNeil, ( Family Affair 's Sebastian Cabot) to clear off squatters from oil rich land, has-been gunslinger Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young) makes an example of out of Swedish farmer Sven Hansen, shooting him down in hopes of scaring off the other rabble-rousers. But ...

Part of a wave of WW2 epics released in the late '60s and early '70s that wound up as perfect Sunday afternoon "Dad-movies" for at least a decade longer, The Bridge at Remagen (1969) rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as better known titles like The Longest Day or The Dirty Dozen . But director John Guillermin's film certainly delivers the requisite amount of action and destruction - at one point leveling an entire town without the aid of models or computer effects - and even pushes an early anti-war message that must have tied in well with the current state of affairs in Vietnam. Producer David L. Wolper, who would change the face of television with mini-series events like Roots and The Thorn Birds , pulls together a competent cast who, though they may lack marquee appeal, serve the story well. George Segal leads the charge as Lt. Phil Hartman, a jaded survivor who knows the war is winding down and resents any order that puts his men in jeopardy. ...

Released just a few months after The Godfather , Dino De Laurentis' own mafia origin story, The Valachi Papers (1972) had the same literary pedigree with the added bonus of a being based on the true account of Joe Valachi, a mob family foot soldier whose testimony before the U.S. Senate revealed many of the secrets and rituals of the infamous Costa Nostra organization. But where Coppola's film provided a richly romantic view of loyalty, honor and the twisted American dream, director Terence Young takes a "tell-all" approach, starting with Valachi's early days as a two-bit burglar, his rise through the ranks and a lengthy prison term that makes him a sitting duck for a lifetime worth of enemies. The film begins with Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson) as a sixty-something federal inmate dodging one murder attempt after another, each orchestrated by Don Vito Genovese (Lino Ventura) who believes him to be a dangerous informant. Ironically, it's that very situat...