Movieline Online

The 4 th  entry in a 10-chapter film saga from Toei,  Big Time Gambling Boss  (1968) shuffles the yakuza deck and deals out its story in a manner unique to the cluttered criminal underworld genre.  There’s still some swordplay and stabbing, but director Kosaku Yamashita emphasizes  internal  conflicts with a surprisingly mature and restrained take on allegiance to the gangster code versus a strong moral compass.  Alternately glorifying and condemning the yakuza lifestyle, the film offers up a complicated character drama that earned high praise from writer / director Paul Schrader who called it an “art house rose blooming from exploitation roots.”  After the leader of the Tenryu clan suffers a debilitating stroke, a plot is hatched from within to push the clan into risky territory involving drugs and foreign contraband.  Senba (Nobuo Kaneko) stirs the pot by pitting several possible successors against one another, including Naka...

The horror genre took a dramatic turn after the success of  Rosemary's Baby  (1968).  Suddenly, castles, cobwebs and fangs were about as popular as three-day-old donuts.  Which meant that adaptations of reliable literary authors like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft needed a fast facelift before hitting theaters.  And that's exactly what AIP attempted with this  rather desperate psychedelic spin on  The Dunwich Horror  (1970). Director Daniel Haller had already taken a semi-successful crack at Lovecraft once with 1965's  Die Monster Die , so he probably seemed as good a choice as any to steer the story of yet another interdimensional incursion by the "Old Ones," this time invited into our world by one Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) who plans to supernaturally impregnate a naive college girl (Sandra Dee) with the help of the infamous Necronomicon.  After stealing a copy from Miskatonic University, Wilbur heads...

The best cinematic martial artists are those who can look convincingly pissed off on camera.  No, really.  Witness the success of Bruce Lee, whose orgasmic anger after every punch made him an international superstar.  Sonny Chiba?  Same angry skill set.  And that’s what makes Angela Mao such a thrill to watch, combining undeniable feminine appeal with a serious case of resting-bitch-face.  No one has  ever  looked more beautiful when they’re angry! Known in the US mostly for her brief role in  Enter the  Dragon (1973), Angelo Mao’s  real  kung-fu coming out party,  Hapkido  (1972), pairs her with up-and-coming fight choreographer Sammo Hung in a non-stop series of fight sequences that proved once and for all it didn’t take a Y-chromosome to kick ass.  It’s paired  with another Mao film from the same year,  Lady Whirlwind  (1972), on a stellar new double-feature se...

You simply can’t overstate how much Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey revolutionized science fiction cinema.  Almost overnight, a new bar was raised not only for achievement in special effects but for narrative and thematic maturity.  And when the marketing department stumbled upon “the ultimate trip” tagline, an entirely new audience of 18 to 24 year olds under the influence of mind altering substances found a complementary celluloid experience.  So it was probably just a natural evolution to hand the reigns over to special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull for a follow-up, 1972’s Silent Running, an environmentally aware sci-fi opus that, despite an earnest performance from Bruce Dern, lays on the counter-culture message a bit too thick. Drifting through the solar system in an oversized terrarium, the crew of the SS Valley Forge is part of an ambitious - but now nearly forgotten - effort to preserve Earth’s forests for a future re-seeding when the post-apocalypti...

There were plenty of heir apparents to Bruce Lee’s martial arts crown after his untimely death.  But the one with the most charisma was Sonny Chiba, a former matinee idol who reinvented himself in the ‘70s with and anti-hero attitude and a smoldering stare.  The same year his  Streetfighter  films propelled him to cult stardom, 1974’s  The Executioner  proved his flexibility in the genre, leading a team of  Charlie’s Angels -style criminals into all-out war against foreign drug smugglers.  More spoof than stunt-heavy action pic, the violence is balanced with sexist  Benny Hill  comedy and plenty of jokes at the tough guy’s expense. Koga (Sonny Chiba), trained as a ninja since childhood, is recruited by an underground organization to rid Japan of the criminal element police are unable to handle themselves.   Teamed with an ex-cop turned hitman and comic-relief dojo master, the trio works their way through the...

It’s tough to explain movie fandom to a generation raised on the internet.  Prior to the exchange of instantaneous opinions and cliques of like-minded twitter feeds, a personal obsession with horror, sci-fi or comic books guaranteed you a seat at the nerdy lunch table.  I know, because I was one of the official seatwarmers.  And so was director Patrick Read Johnson, whose autobiographical film  5-25-77  (the date  Star Wars  premiered nationwide) was just as much a behind-the-scenes struggle to complete as high school. Struck with the movie bug after a screening of  2001: A Space Odyssey , Patrick (John Francis Daley) spends most of his youth staging elaborate Super 8 sequels to popular films of the day…like turning the backyard swimming pool red to get a shot for  Jaws 2  or creating his own monkey masks for  Requiem for the Planet of the Apes .  But life gets complicated when girls, friends and financial r...

How deep a dive do you want to take into the horror genre?  Seen all the slashers, torture-porn and creature features?  Slogged your way through the regional roughies and black-and-white classics?  Then maybe you’re ready for  Heartland of Darkness , a student-shot project from a team of Ohio State filmmakers who managed to cast ‘80s horror icon Linnea Quigley in a small role…but never managed to complete the film itself.   An unreleased rarity that rises above most of the shot on video fan films of the day (director Eric Swelstad insisted on 16mm), the project is nevertheless rife with all of the decades’ video store cliches:  bare breasts, bad acting and a dash of satanic panic for good measure. Newly appointed as the editor of a midwestern newspaper, Paul Henson uncovers a dangerous cult lurking beneath the innocuous surface of his adopted small town.  The nefarious figure behind it all is Reverend Donovan who comm...

Fans have been trying to score some street cred for Bob Clark going on several decades now.  Despite pretty much inventing the American slasher genre with  Black Christmas , the director remains a footnote for only the diligent of horror cinephiles…perhaps because he abandoned the genre to score mainstream success with  Porky’s ,  A Christmas Story  and  Baby Geniuses  (yeah, we all threw up in our mouths a little bit on that last one). But as with a lot of ambitious filmmakers, Clark found early success with a trio of titles –  Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things ,  Deathdream  and the aforementioned  Black Christmas  – that remain highly regarded to this day. Shot in Florida on 35mm, but emulating the thrills of cut-rate zombie drive-in fare,  Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things  (1972) is probably only essential viewing for its historical value, both as Clark’s first notable feature  and  a...

Having lived through the Bigfoot-craze of the ‘70s I can tell you that no movie ever quite got it right (although the Bionic Bigfoot in  The Six Million Dollar Man  ranks pretty high up there!)  Ironically, the search for everyone’s favorite bipedal primate was perfect for the found footage format which was more or less how 1972’s  The Legend of Boggy Creek  kicked things off.  Four years later,  Creature from Black Lake  drove back to the swamps for another go, this time using a  Jaws -like approach, keeping the legendary antagonist in the shadows for most of the running time.  Rives and Pahoo (names so ridiculous they have to be spelled out on the back of their shirts) are a couple of Yankee college students making a spectacle of themselves in a small Arkansas town.  Their search for Bigfoot revolves around information from a trapper (Jack Elam) whose partner was a killed by the monster deep in the bayou. ...