Movieline Online

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 (...