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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...