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Watching Gidget (1959) in the modern era of women's rights issue and hourly sexual harassment scandals is a genuinely harrowing experience. What was most certainly an enjoyably empowering adventure about a 16-year-old tomboy blossoming into womanhood is now inescapably creepy. Male viewers will almost feel compelled to cover their eyes on the off chance they're held complicit with the film's multiple sexual predators competing for the affection of an obviously underage girl. Seriously. Of course any film produced in 1959 is bound to have its share of anachronisms. But this comic coming-of-age story, based on a string of popular books that also hit the small screen starring Sally Field, has incredibly bad timing, premiering on a 3000-copy limited edition blu-ray just when society has reached the breaking point when it comes to inappropriate, unwanted male-female relationships. And Gidget is full of them! Young Francie Lawrence (Sandra Dee) would much rather surf...

Horror, as a genre, is both timely and timeless. The shock tactics, as any fan will admit, are pleasantly predictable, but resource-challenged filmmakers tend to populate them with a fresh batch of pop culture references and trendy character quirks. In English? Horror movies make the most of the era in which they were made. Better Watch Out (2017) is no exception, starting with a done-to-death "home invasion" scenario then cleverly covering it tracks to attempt something fresh and new...relatively speaking. For her final babysitting job before leaving for college, Ashley (Olivia DeJonge) takes on her regular gig at the Lerner's with their son Luke (Levi Miller), a quiet 13-year-old she's been watching for years. Expertly fending off his misguided romantic advances, Ashley winds up fighting for both their lives when a stranger with a shotgun hunts them from room to room. But when the identity of the intruder is revealed, an innocent prank quickly escalates in...

Every bit as chilling, powerful and culturally relevant as better-known horror films like Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , 1974's Deathdream is an overlooked masterpiece in a genre that tosses the word around far too casually. But director Bob Clark ( A Christmas Story ) and writer Alan Ormsby deliver a legitimate shocker that also serves as a not-so-subtle commentary on the post-Vietnam experience. Anxious for word about their son, Andy, the Brooks family has dinner interrupted by a telegram announcing his death. Unwilling to accept the truth, Mrs. Brooks prays for his safe return; and her wish is granted, with terrible consequences. Andy's late-night arrival coincides with the brutal murder of a truck driver, and their son's behavior is nothing short of sociopathic. After Andy murders the family dog, Mr. Brooks calls on the local doctor for advice who quickly connects all the dots. Andy is actually "undead," injecting himsel...

A possession story that skews closer to Jekyll and Hyde than The Exorcist , 1976's J.D.'s Revenge is certainly an outlier amidst the usual action-oriented blaxploitation releases of the day. Lead actor Glynn Turman modeled his terrific performance after Spencer Tracey's turn as the tortured doctor in the 1941 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's story. Here, a hardworking law student / taxi driver finds his personality overtaken by the soul of a 1940s numbers racketeer out for revenge against those who done him wrong. After participating in an onstage hypnotism act, Isaac (Turman) is tortured by flashbacks of memories that aren't his own. Inexplicably, the spirit of J.D. Walker, who was set up for the murder of his own sister, has been reborn, forcing Isaac to commit brutal acts against those he loves and hunt down the people responsible for his death 30 years ago. One of those people is Reverend Elija Bliss (Louis Gossett, Jr.), a former fighter turned evang...

While Hammer Films is known primarily as the "House of Horror" thanks to its long-running series of Dracula, Frankenstein and assorted monster films throughout the sixties and seventies, the studio actually branched out into other genres quite a bit during its history. 1962's The Pirates of Blood River is one of a few swashbucklers - including Captain Clegg and Night Creatures - that offered audiences a reprieve the onslaught of the undead. Here, Captain LaRoche (Hammer stalwart Christopher Lee) leads his motley crew through a deadly swamp in search of treasure hidden somewhere on a Huguenot farming settlement; treasure that even the settler's themselves claim doesn't exist! The film's genesis begins with producer Anthony Nelson Keys requesting a script from staff writer Jimmy Sangster, the man responsible for most of Hammer's early success. But the one big caveat? There's no money for an actual pirate ship . So The Pirates of Blood River...

No one plays cowboy better than Jeff Bridges. In fact, he's gotten so good a pulling off the toothless, beer-bellied, past-his-prime gunhand (see True Grit or Hell or High Water ) that it's getting difficult to picture him as anything else. Ironic for a California kid whose early roles were mostly freewheeling hippies with an infectious grin. And, although he'd dabbled in the Old West before, 1995's Wild Bill is one of the signposts for the second half of his career, directed with a sort of ruthless poetry by western aficionado and action specialist Walter ( The Warriors ) Hill. Hill's screenplay pulls material from several sources to create its own slideshow of the life of Wild Bill Hickok, a legendary figure of the American West whose exploits grow in stature with each telling of the tale. After stints as a soldier, a buffalo hunter, a lawman and a performer, Bill's legend finally comes to rest in the town of Deadwood, a pop-up gold rush community t...

The oft-repeated quote "Dying is easy... Comedy is hard" never really sinks in until you watch something that perfectly illustrates how difficult the genre can be to pull off. Whiskey Galore! (2016) is a remake of the 1949 British comedy from Ealing Studios that related the story (based on actual events) of a conspiracy among the thirsty population of an isolated Scottish Isle to pilfer the precious alcoholic cargo of a freighter stuck on the rocks just offshore. While the original managed to pull off a breezy bit of rebellious wit with a likable cast of characters, director Gillies MacKinnon only makes a passing attempt to do the same. Instead, his version feels very much like a stab at serious drama that doesn't deserve the exclamation point at the end of its title. Built around the actual wreck of the SS Politician, which ran aground during WWII off the north coast of Eriskay carrying 22,000 cases of whiskey - 7,000 of which the locals managed to swipe before it s...

Anti-war films weren't invented simply to accommodate the Vietnam experience. A quick perusal of cinematic history will find each major conflict (and plenty of minor ones) have been used as a backdrop for stories full of the horrors and hypocrisy of warfare. In fact this negative spin is a lot more common than the relatively short-lived, government-mandated patriotism of Hollywood's golden years. But 1967's The Dirty Dozen proved you could still have a good time doing it and paved the way for dozens of like-minded imitators. Play Dirty (1969) followed two years later with a title that made the connection embarrassingly obvious. But the production ran into problems even before it hit theaters. Richard Harris was the first to jump ship - reportedly due conflicts with co-star Michael Caine - then original director Rene Clement was fired and replaced by Andre De Toth who hadn't been behind a camera for six years. Yet despite the plagiaristic plot and shuffled cast...

It's easy to forget after the rise of Spielberg, Scorsese, and Coppola, but during Hollywood's golden years it was the producer who was king. The studio system didn't leave much room for individual artistic expression; the recipe for success was mustering the machinery's best resources in service of story that would put all that effort on the screen. And few did it better than Darryl F. Zanuck. Take for example Captain from Castile (1947), a frenetically paced, historical epic that jumps from the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition to the new-world adventures Cortez and his gold-crazy Conquistadores. As a accurate portrayal of actual events, things get a bit whitewashed, but as Hollywood spectacle it's practically a "how-to" demo reel of production savvy from the first frame to the last. The son of a famous ex-soldier, Pedro De Vargas (Tyrone Power) is stunned when he and his family are accused of heresy and thrown into prison. But he soon real...

Part of a wave of satanic-inspired films that began with Rosemary's Baby and continued to possess cinema screens throughout the rest of the '70s, The Devil's Rain (1975) is the most narratively-challenged film of the bunch. But viewed from a distance of several decades, director Robert Fuest's cast of old Hollywood pros (Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, Eddie Albert, William Shatner), new faces (Tom Skerritt, John Travolta) and a highlight reel of hallucinogenic special effects makes for a bizarrely effective collage of stream-of-consciousness horror. Investigating the disappearance of his family, Tom Preston (Skerritt) and his ESP-enhanced wife (Joan Prather) wind up cornered by a cult of Satan worshippers who've taken over a desert ghost town. Led by Corbis (Borgnine), the reincarnation of a Salem-era warlock, his eyeless hordes are intent on recovering a sacred book that the Preston family has kept hidden for hundreds of years, thereby preventing him from sa...