Movieline Online

Those who write off the Blaxsploitation genre as merely a glorification of the uglier urban elements of black culture are only half-right. Films like Willie Dynamite (1974) certainly had a love-hate relationship with their lead characters, glamorizing the pimped-out lifestyle - complete with a purple Lincoln town car, mink coats and a stable of beautiful "bitches." But the film pulls the rug out from under the audience and Willie by staging a cinematic intervention that calls for a surprising cultural shift. Attacking the streets with capitalistic fervor, Willie goes against the pimp council (yeah, apparently they have one of those) and instructs his ladies to work wherever and whenever they'd like. But a do-gooder social worker, Cora, who once worked the streets herself, wreaks havoc with his business, turning his women against him and tipping off the cops to badger him with minor offenses. The cumulative effect gets Willie off balance, eventually questioning the ...

Somewhat tedious by giallo standards, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion splits the difference between the plentiful sex and violence typical of the genre and a more highbrow psychological approach. It's a film that keeps you guessing until the final scene (thanks for Ernesto Gastaldi's script) but feels more like a stretched out version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents ...if 'ol Hitch was allowed to really cut loose. Socialite housewife Minou (Dagmar Lassander) is blackmailed by a stranger (Simon Andreu) who has evidence that will implicate her husband in a murder. Desperate to keep him out of prison, she agrees to sleep with the blackmailer to shut him up. But the nightmare continues when a series of photos are delivered to the house, capturing Minou in several compromising positions. When the police finally get involved, all evidence of the alleged affair - and the blackmailer himself - disappears, putting Minou story, and sanity, in question. Gastaldi'...

While collaborations with director Martin Scorsese helped establish Robert De Niro's onscreen persona, his cinematic career began several years before Mean Streets and Taxi Driver ever hit screens. In fact, his early work with director Brian De Palma reveals an actor almost fully-developed from the very beginning, working with the same level of intensity and charismatic appeal. Simply put: the camera loves him. But in films like Greetings, Hi, Mom and The Wedding Party , De Palma's camera takes a far more scattershot approach than his later Hitchcock-inspired genre work. For all it's improvised, counterculture posturing, Greetings (1968) is the most accessible and interesting of the bunch. Following a trio of draft-age young men through Greenwich Village as they attempt to avoid being sent to Vietnam, the fragmentary plot involves computer dating, the Kennedy conspiracy and - most recognizable to De Palma fans - voyeurism. Jon Rubin (De Niro) proposes a series of ...

Under orders from ABC to include more monsters, but saddled with a significantly smaller budget to create them, the new production team behind season two of The Outer Limits (which wound up totaling 17 episodes) had to do more with less. New showrunner Ben Brady fought back with big ideas, adapting source material from sci-fi writers like Harlan Ellison in an attempt to make a strong literary impression...even if the technical execution wasn't always up to snuff. That describes the second season of the cult sci-fi anthology (which ran from 1963 to 1965) fairly well: a collection of great ideas brought to the screen under challenging circumstances. Ellison's two installments are the obvious highlights ( Soldier and Demon with a Glass Hand ), so ahead of their time that James Cameron settled out of court due to the similarities to The Terminator . But ignoring the rest of the episodes is selling the show short, all of which scratch that peculiar sci-fi itch in a way that no...

There was a time when New York City was dangerous, both in the physical and moral sense. A time when hookers were more common than rich housewives with dogs stuffed in their purses. When Times Square was a place to get cheap thrills, not cheap TVs and discount merchandise. The cinema of the ‘70s captured this very well (perhaps none better than Scorsese’s Taxi Driver ), but William Lustig’s Maniac is a worthy document of NYC’s sordid past, a surprising psychological profile and a down ‘n dirty exploitation movie to boot. Joe Spinell plays serial killer Frank Zito as a tortured soul, driven to murder by the memory of his prostitute mother. The fact that his character evokes sympathy despite the atrocity of his crimes (expertly and gruesomely executed by Tom Savini, who also has a small role) is a testament to both Lustig’s direction and Spinell’s performance. By all rights Maniac should have been simply another Halloween clone (it was certainly advertised as such) but instead...

Despite being the second-highest grossing film of director Robert Altman's illustrious career and stuffed with a who's who of British acting talent, Gosford Park has been almost entirely eclipsed by the BBC show that was initially created as a spin-off of the same: Downton Abbey . But Julian Fellowes' success with his small-screen follow-up should in no way diminish Altman's ensemble who-dun-it, which establishes the ground rules for the upstairs / downstairs class dichotomy with a complexity that frustrates and fascinates in equal measure. As the guests arrive for an overnight shooting party (attendees include Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles Dance, Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Ryan Phillippe and Maggie Smith among others), the stage is set for a muted melodrama between the ruling class and their long-suffering servants. Family patriarch William McCordle (Michael Gambon) is despised by most of his blood relatives and bedding most of the female staff. So...

If Zombie represents the pinnacle of Italian excess, director Aldo Lado's Short Night of Glass Dolls is its cerebral opposite. Just a year after Argento’s groundbreaking giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage , Lado tried to up the ante with his politically minded thriller, Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971). Featuring a fair share of recognizable stars (Jean Sorel, Ingrid Thulin and Barbara Bach), stunning cinematography and an unsettling Ennio Morricone score, the film is a direct reflection of Lado’s enthusiasm as a first-time filmmaker. The raw ingredients are nothing special within the genre – Bach disappears without a trace, Sorel tracks her down amidst a crowd of likely suspects – but the director uses a clever flashback technique to tell the story. Trapped in a cataleptic state, journalist Gregory Moore (Sorel) is wheeled into the city morgue, desperately trying to communicate with the technicians who've already declared him dead. As Moore struggles to recall...

Fulci Lives! Never heard the expression? Attend any horror convention across the country you’ll see more T-shirts with this slogan than mullets at a rodeo. That’s because Lucio Fulci, the Italian director behind Zombie, really knows how to impale an eyeball. Zombie is, if not the director’s most accomplished film, certainly his most bankable thanks to the pseudo-sequel tie-in with Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Fulci, though, doesn’t waste his time with social satire or dark comedy but gets right down the bloody business of loosing his zombie horde on the world (or at least, the parts he can afford the location costs). The film opens with a very effective Nosferatu image of an abandoned sailboat drifting into New York harbor. Well, almost abandoned. On board is a decomposing but dangerous zombie escapee from a mysterious South Seas island. This discovery prompts a couple of amateur sleuths – actors Tisa Farrow (Mia’s sister) and Ian McCulloch (not the Echo and Bunnymen singer) – to track d...

Hammer Films released some of the most progressive horror films ever made, including shocking full-color reboots of the Universal monster catalog. But they also produced a good amount of escapist adventure films that fans don't remember near as fondly, including Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), a feature film adaptation of the popular British TV program featuring the exploits of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Part of this cinematic dead zone is due to simple supply and demand: Hammer aficionados haven't really had a chance to appreciate the studio's lesser-known efforts. Twilight Time's 3000-copy limited edition Blu-ray should rectify that somewhat with a fine hi-def transfer courtesy of Columbia Pictures. As for the film itself, well, there's a reason the studio specialized in horror. At his best, director Terence Fisher had a knack for turning stuffy, set-bound stories into intensely terrifying cinema experiences. But the gorgeous outdoor landscapes of S...

A turning point in Brian De Palma's career, Sisters (1972) not only marked the director's move from free-from counter-culture comedies to tightly constructed thrillers, but labeled him as the foremost disciple of Hitchcockian cinema, emphasizing camerawork as much as (and often more than ) his characters. But instead of riffing on just one particular Hitchcock film, Sisters bounces from one "inspiration" to another, using the backbone of Rear Window and Psycho as a launching point for De Palma's original story of conjoined twins whose physical separation causes a dangerous mental break. Dominique and Danielle (both played by Margot Kidder) slipped out of the public eye after their supposedly successful operation at a secretive clinic on Staten Island. Dominique, the charming and outgoing sister, brings home a potential lover (Lisle Wilson) to their apartment, only to have Danielle murder him in a jealous rage. The event is witnessed by Grace Collier (...

One of the most impressive characteristics of genre filmmaking is its endless flexibility. Horror, comedies, Westerns: instead of being confined by their cinematic structure, there's a subversive thrill in watching a clever writer or director stretch the creative boundaries. Released in 1958, The Bravados is a straightforward revenge western starring Gregory Peck...except it's not. Jim Douglass (Peck) is a stoic rancher in pursuit of the four men who killed his family, arriving in Rio Arriba just in time to watch them hang. But a prison break puts him on their trail again, tracking down each outlaw and enforcing his own swift and deadly justice; despite the fact the each man claims they're innocent of the crime. It's that final question mark - along with some disturbing intimations of sexual assault - that makes The Bravados something far more than just another Hollywood oater. There's a dark underbelly to the story that pre-dates the Spaghetti Western...

While Michael Crichton's Westworld is now a buzz worthy HBO show, his other cinematic critique on the perils of a false reality is finally getting a hi-def facelift. In 1981's Looker , Albert Finney is a plastic surgeon set up to take the fall for a string of suspicious suicides involving his supermodel patients. The conspiracy involves a computer-scanning technology (motion capture in today's lingo, still science-fiction in the early '80s) that recreates the actor as a perfect three-dimensional model. But corporate interests see the potential for much more than selling swimsuits and dish soap, forcing them to eliminate any loose ends. The synopsis above is actually a handy reference guide, since Crichton's script isn't exactly sure how or why the bad guys (led by James Coburn) are executing their evil plan. But Looker remains great fun throughout, mostly thanks to the introduction of a clever "looker gun" that hypnotizes its victim with a f...

An elegy for the hardworking street corner politician, John Ford's The Last Hu rrah (1958) presciently tracks the rise of TV-ready public officials, manufactured out of cue cards and staged family cutouts. It makes it tough for a career baby-kisser like Mayor Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy), fighting for re-election against not only his empty-headed opponent, but a cadre of political enemies bearing personal, professional and religious grudges that go back to their rough immigrant upbringings. Our tour guide through this minefield is Skeffington's nephew (Jeffrey Hunter), an apolitical journalist who comes to understand - and even admire - his uncle's sometimes heavy-handed way of getting the job done. But there's no mistake on which side Ford's bread is buttered; that's pretty clear with the casting of Tracey. Called upon to perform some shady maneuvers and a bit of blackmail, underneath is all Skeffington is an honest, generous and deeply moral man...

It's difficult to explain the impact network TV had on pop culture to a generation used to niche programming that's only a click away. Although most content was watered down for mass consumption, there were moments of brilliance that slipped through the cracks of overly lit mediocrity. Trilogy of Terror (1975) is perhaps the most famous of the small-screen fright flicks that warped impressionable minds with the now legendary final chapter of Richard Matheson's anthology, Amelia , involving an African fetish doll terrorizing Karen Black in her own home. But the it's the film's first segment, involving a Twilight Zone take on sexual predators, that has become the most timely. Director Dan Curtis had already had success with the horror genre, masterminding the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows and Night Stalker TV movies and subsequent series. Trilogy of Terror is built around three short stories from novelist and Twilight Zone veteran Richard Matheson, ea...

Although Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetee is part of the basic text in film schools across the country, the time travel photo play was generally unknown to mass audiences. Which made its clever conceit of a man witnessing his own death as a child the perfect starting place for Twelve Monkeys (1995), a much more elaborate (and needlessly complicated) extrapolation of Marker's themes of love, loss and memory. A post apocalyptic "volunteer" sent back to the '90s to gather information on the disease that will destroy humanity, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is promptly locked up in a mental institution where he befriends fellow inmate Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt). A genuine psychotic with nihilistic tendencies, Goines is in turn inspired by James' alternate reality, plotting to use his father's medical research facility to return the world to its true owners: the animals. James eventually convinces his psychiatrist Madeleine Stowe) to help put a stop...

A gaslight thriller with film noir and horror elements, The Spiral Staircase (1946) had a gimmick good enough to be remade three times but none of them could top the Robert Siodmak original. The old, dark house scenario traps its cast of characters inside a sprawling mansion where a killer - whose previous victims all suffered from some physical affliction - stalks a mute serving girl shocked into silence from a childhood trauma. Helen (Dorothy McGuire) is understandably nervous after witnessing the latest crime scene. And even more so when her elderly employer, Mrs. Warren, insists she's not safe in their own house, insinuating that the murderer is someone she knows. The Warren brothers are both likely suspects, but so is the seemingly altruistic family physician, Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), who takes an unusual interest in Helen's disability. When a violent storm moves in and the killer's identity is finally revealed, Helen would seem to make the perfect silent victi...

After Psycho II , a film that turned out far better than it had any right to, writer Tom Holland was a relatively hot commodity. So much so that he demanded a shot at directing his own screenplay for Fright Night (1985), one of the most beloved horror flicks of the '80s. But that may never have happened if it wasn't for Scream for Help , an atrociously tone-deaf domestic thriller directed by Michael Winner ( Death Wish ) from Holland's original script about a teenager who thinks her stepfather is trying to murder her mother. Christie suspects her stepfather, Paul, of staging a string of household accidents in an attempt to keep her mother's inheritance all to himself. And after following him around town for days, her instincts are proven correct. But Paul isn't working alone; and his partners won't hesitate to wipe out Christie's family and friends to get what they want. With its uninspired voice-over narration and sleazy marital scheming, Scr...

Imagine if you took that flat, over-lit look of a 1970s sitcom and inserted the most twisted, bizarre scenario you could come up with? The disconcerting result would be The Baby , directed by TV veteran Ted Post, about a family of three scheming women who keep a 20-year-old man-child locked up in a crib. The storyline is unusual enough on its own, but combined with Post’s deadpan visual style (or anti- style) is becomes flat-out disturbing, yet compulsively watchable. Although it’s rated PG, The Baby dances around more images of child abuse, overt sexuality and emotional torture than a David Lynch film. Yet it’s the nuanced performance by former ‘50s starlet Ruth Roman as Baby’s mother, who rules her family like a matriarchal Marlon Brando, that you’ll remember most. Not unlike 1968’s Spider Baby , the Wadsworth’s family ties create a web that hopelessly traps anyone who tries to break them up. The Baby stands alone as one of the most surreal movie experiences of the 1970s. A...

Imagine if you took that flat, over-lit look of a 1970s sitcom and inserted the most twisted, bizarre scenario you could come up with? The disconcerting result would be The Baby , directed by TV veteran Ted Post, about a family of three scheming women who keep a 20-year-old manchild locked up in a crib. The storyline is unusual enough on its own, but combined with Post’s deadpan visual style (or anti- style) is becomes flat-out disturbing, yet compulsively watchable. Although it’s rated PG, The Baby dances around more images of child abuse, overt sexuality and emotional torture than a David Lynch film. Yet it’s the nuanced performance of former ‘50s starlet Ruth Roman as Baby’s mother, who rules her family like a matriarchal Marlon Brando, that you’ll remember most. Not unlike 1968’s Spider Baby , the Wadsworth’s family ties create a web that hopelessly traps anyone who tries to break them up. The Baby stands alone as one of the most surreal movie experiences of the 1970s. And...

For those who rarely dig deeper into cinema history than BuzzFeed best-of lists, 1972's The Hot Rock will be a revelation. How did a heist film starring Robert Redford, based on a novel by the legendary Donald Westlake - with a screenplay by the equally legendary William Goldman - not crack anyone's top ten?! This caper comedy is long overdue for rediscovery, staging not one but four heists as our team of semi-pros attempt to steal - then recover - a precious African diamond. Redford plays recently un-incarcerated thief Dortmunder, the brains behind a four-man operation hired by an African diplomat to liberate the ceremonial stone from its display case in a New York museum. But with each step forward, the plan takes one step back as the stone falls into the wrong hands time and time again, forcing the team to elaborately break into a prison, police station and bank vault to track down their missing property. The audience isn't privy to the planning; the real thrill...

No matter how worldly or open-minded you are as a cinema fan, there's always something lost in translation when it comes to a foreign film. Japanese culture in particular presents an interesting challenge involving traditions, rituals and social obligations that can seem laughably complex. Bloody Speak at Mount Fuji (1955) would seem to complicate the situation even further by being set during the Edo era, the same historical staging area as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai released a year earlier. But, like Kurosawa, director Tomu Uchida seems to go out of his way to introduce the Japanese caste system, which sharply divided servants from their masters, in such a way that his story has universal appeal. A road movie of sorts, Sakawa Kojuro is a samurai traveling with his two servants, Genta and Gonpachi, to deliver a ceremonial gift. But the road is crowded with fellow travelers en route to a local festival whose stories intersect with Kojuro and his companions. A dedic...

Just because a film is "formulaic" doesn't necessarily mean it's a waste of time. After all, repetition of storytelling techniques is a common device even in literary circles, so why should the cinema be held to a higher standard? But it's those films that deviate from the expected formula, even in small ways, that leaves the most lasting impression...for good or bad. In Italy, the giallo (a sexy, murder mystery) is defined by its body count approach in much the same way as the American slasher film. Yet, The Pyjama Girl Case (1977), produced at the tail end of the genre's lifespan, doesn’t follow the formula as we know it. Based on an actual Australian police case in the 30’s, Ray Milland gets top billing as Inspector Thompson, a retired cop who bullies his way onto a case involving a Jane Doe found shot, beaten and burned on a public beach. Other than a pair of tattered yellow pajamas, the body offers few clues. So few, in fact, that the police pres...

If the success of 1969's Easy Rider proved one thing, it's that Hollywood had no idea what it was doing. The studios were playing catch with an audience that was one step ahead of them and an accidental windfall like the Peter Fonda / Dennis Hopper counter culture phenomena wasn't going to happen every week. So they handed over the creative reigns to a generation anxious to do something different resulting in a watershed moment for American cinema in the early '70s. But sometimes, those responsible for such creative innovation got left behind. For his directing debut, Peter Fonda probably couldn't have chosen a more risky project than The Hired Hand (1971). The low-budget affair wasn't financially precarious, but saddling up in a genre that his famous father pretty much owned was a far cry from his previous success as a pot-smoking, motorcycle-riding rebel. And, as an actor, Fonda pales in comparison, cutting the same lanky, dramatic figure, but wit...

Horror, as a genre, is infinitely adaptable; meaning the same story can be repurposed by different filmmakers with entirely different results. For example, Impulse (1984) and Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988) share a government-conspiracy, environmental disaster plot line that is nearly identical. Yet the style, tone and execution of each script veer in wildly different directions. Produced well-before the cinematic zombie renaissance, Impulse feels like the illegitimate love-child of George Romero's The Crazies and Cronenberg's Shivers mixed in with a few chapters of Stephen King's The Stand for good measure. But despite those better-known inspirations, director Graham Baker's film has a leg up on all of them by virtue of its superior cast and production values. Arriving in the small town of Stubbenfield, big city power couple Jennifer and Stuart immediately notice that something is amiss: people are becoming emotionally unhinged, acting upon their ...

Sure, Prozac and Zoloft are a miracle of medical science. But for a natural pick-me-up, you can't do much better than My Sister Eileen , a zippy 1955 musical from Columbia with a screenplay from Blake Edwards and cutting-edge choreography by none other than Bob Fosse, who's also one of the co-stars in this story of two Ohio sisters trying their luck on the mean streets of Manhattan. With an emphasis on footwork over catchy songs (although it has a couple of those, to boot), director Richard Quine's film puts plenty of razzle-dazzle on the screen...and a good amount of stars, too! Arriving from Columbus with dreams of making it big, Ruth Sherwood (Betty Garrett) and her sister Eileen (Janet Leigh) have no job prospects and a quirky apartment full of equally quirky - but encouraging - residents. A natural beauty, Eileen tests the waters as an actress with the help of a local soda jerk (Fosse). Ruth, used to playing second best, attracts the attention of a playboy publ...

Though its poster promises monumental entertainment the likes of Ben Hur and similar Hollywood historical epics, 1965's Genghis Khan is a really nothing of the sort. Sure, there are a pair of battle sequences involving hundreds of armored extras, swordplay, stuntmen and stunt horses, set against an impressive widescreen landscape. But they're almost presented as afterthoughts in this story of Temujin, a Mongol boy raised as a prisoner of war who rises to power by uniting the warring tribes of central Asia, eventually earning the title Genghis Khan: ultimate ruler. Director Henry Levin's take on things is much more character (or in some cases, caricature ) driven, starting with Tauzin’s escape from captivity and recruitment of new soldiers to establish his empire from the ground up. Traveling to China, he finds a world of wisdom at his fingertips, but chafes at his position as second in command. Ambition drives him further west, swallowing up new recruits and conqu...

Relationship movies - specifically romantic ones - offer seemingly infinite variations on the theme of love. Maybe that's because, besides our own emotional hang-ups, society is always introducing new speed bumps in the path of true happiness. Such is the case with 1970's Take A Girl Like You , a romantic comedy that runs head first into the sexual revolution and comes back with a bit of a concussion. Set in a small English town, professional bachelor Patrick Standish (Oliver Reed) sees his seduction of the new teacher in town, Jenny (Hayley Mills), as just another conquest. But when she thwarts his sexual advances on the grounds of retaining her virginity, Patrick begins, first, to question "why"....then to question the very lifestyle that he - and the new social mores of free love and sexual liberation - have taken for granted. An odd mixture of meet-cute clichés (set to saccharine-sweet pop songs from The Foundations, no less) and serious emotional pathos, di...

There's really no defense for a movie like Doom Asylum (1987) - a prefabricated cult horror/comedy that typifies the straight-to-video market of the era. With a cast of ex-centerfolds (Patty Mullen), genre veterans (Ruth Collins), up and comers (Kristin Davis of Sex and the City ) and a slew of one-and-dones, the film should have simply vanished into VHS purgatory. But there's something so left-of-center about director Richard Friedman's slice of '80s cheese that it survives as a bizarre shared experience, like a cinematic chain letter no one wants to end. After a car accident, Mitch Hansen winds up on the coroner's table. Trouble is, he's not quite dead. Mad with grief over the death of his hot girlfriend, he kills the technicians about to cut him open and takes up residence in an abandoned asylum where he become the stuff of local legend. 10 years later, a pack of wandering partygoers fall right into his lap, providing a new supply of victims for h...

At its peak, the Italian film industry had no qualms about cannibalizing a successful genre until there was nothing left but a picked over skeleton. But in 1971, Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was still a ripe source of material (and titles) for producers to emulate, pushing the giallo format to new levels of onscreen sex and violence. The Case of the Scorpion's Tail is actually more restrained than some latter titles, but still offers up one heck of a bonkers screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi and energetic direction from Sergio Martino, the two of whom would collaborate several more times in the coming decade. After the death of her husband, Lisa Baumer travels to Greece to collect on the million-dollar insurance policy. But her every move is watched by a greedy mistress out for a piece of the fortune and an insurance agent, Peter Lynch (George Hilton) who suspects it's all a big scam. After a series of murders - and an attempt on his life - Peter...