Movieline Online

The central appeal of a  caper  film isn’t so much the caper itself but the planning that goes into it.  So kudos to writer-director Ron Winston for crafting a film that’s all about setting the stage, with the courage to draw the curtain during the main event.   The Gamblers  (1970) success depends sleight of hand and misdirection, not only for its characters but the audience as well; to make you look the fool, but applaud its technique all the same.  While aboard a cruise of the Adriatic rival gamblers hatches a scheme to fleece a foreign businessman during a rigged game of poker.  Rooney (Don Gordon) has a fail-safe system while Cozzier and Broadfoot (Pierre Olaf and Kenneth Griffith respectively) have access to the mark, including his history as a recovering compulsive gambler.  The wild card is Candace (Suzy Kendall), a beautiful tourist who inserts herself into the plot at the most inopportune moments.  Their pla...

Some spaghetti westerns are innovative genre trailblazers, others thinly disguised political statements and still more career rebirths for foreign actors looking to kickstart their career.  And then there are films like  A Bullet for Sandoval  (1969) which exists for the same reason  most  international co-productions of the era exist:  to turn a profit.  That’s not a petty criticism;  every  film is designed to turn a profit.  Some just disguise the fact better than others. Labeled a deserter for attempting to reach his dying lover in Mexico, Corporal John Warner (George Hilton) arrives too late.  Her domineering father, Pedro Sandoval (Ernest Borgnine), ejects Warner – and his bastard offspring – from the property, forcing him to wander nearby villages looking for sustenance to keep his infant son alive.  Turned away again because of the threat of cholera, the death of Warner’s child turns him in...

Deadgirl  is the sort of movie that keeps you wondering, “Will it  really  go there?”  Necrophilia isn’t exactly new to the horror genre.  It was a staple of Italian gothics as far back as the ‘60s and subsequent decades gave birth to a slew of underground ( Nekromantik ) and prestige projects ( Crash ) that mixed sex with death in exploitive and artistic ways.  But co-directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s 2008 film is equally unique:  a zombie coming-of-age story that blends hormones and horror to shocking affect.   Rickie and JT stumble upon what they initially believe is a female corpse strapped to a gurney in the basement of an abandoned asylum.  But this  corpse  is actually one of the undead, immune to gunshots and the usual methods of destruction.  Sexually opportunistic, JT turns her into his sex slave, eventually inviting other high school outcasts to participate as well.  Despi...

Sammo Hung had appeared in over 80 credited roles before making his debut as a director with 1977’s  The Iron Fisted Monk .  So it was safe to say he knew what he was doing.  But, truth be told, he plays it rather safe in his first outing behind the camera, delivering a formulaic mix of action and hit-or-miss comedy that dips into uncomfortable territory with an extended rape scene in the Hong Kong cut. Yet another Shaolin revenge story, Sammo stars as Husker (or  Husky Joe  in the English dub), a rebellious student anxious to get outside the temple walls and collect his pound of flesh from the Manchus who killed his master.  But he’s inadvertently blamed for the death of a Manchu thug working for a serial rapist which puts him in the crosshairs for a political bloodbath!   Monk ’s story is even more scattershot than usual with fight scenes wedged in between long stretches of male bonding and clumsy flashbacks.  As a director, ...

Rescuing the most tantalizingly obscure SOV oddities, Visual Vengeance is back with a, well,  vengeance  in the form of  Lycan Colony , a 2006 horror epic which made the rounds on  RiffTrax  a few years back.  Loaded with unintentional humor and overly ambitious special effects, you don’t need extra jokes to have a great time with this movie…but it helps. Caught up in a werewolf civil war, two trackers team up with a disgraced doctor to rescue his son from the curse hidden in plain sight in a small East Coast town.  Like an unrehearsed bit of  Howling  fan fiction,  Lycan Colony  is completely unapologetic about its technical flaws, including bad green screen effects, jump cuts, sloppy video composites and hilarious regional accents.  Which makes it a perfect party movie in nearly every respect.     Writer-director Rob Roy, who turned the film into a series of self-published novels, is so earnest i...

For the uninitiated, Amando de Ossorio’s  Blind Dead  films are one of the tentpoles of the Euro-horror genre.  But they can be an acquired taste.  While one comes to expect and embrace the flaws inherent in low-budget exploitation, Ossorio’s mummified creations are so stiff and skeletally posed it requires nearly monumental suspension of disbelief to allow oneself to be frightened. Yet there’s a shambling atmosphere of nihilistic dread that overcomes the film’s baser instincts. When a romantic triangle goes wrong, Virginia hops off a passenger train and winds up spending the night in the abandoned medieval town of Berzano, the former stronghold of a group of satanic worshipping Knights Templar.  Her presence awakens their ancient bloodlust, tracking their victims by  sound  to compensate for their sightless skulls.  Feeling guilty, her friends return to the scene of the crime but wind up facing the same threat from the undead ...

Humphrey Bogart made a career playing complicated criminals.  Escaped con Glen Griffin in 1955’s  The Desperate Hours  might not be his most memorable, but it’s a performance that rides on the shoulders of all the gangsters and hoodlums he’s played before.  Director William Wyler’s film is less a home invasion thriller than a rallying cry for the moral fortitude of the nuclear family.  So it’s fitting that this is Bogart’s second-to-last role…taking his final bow as an urban outlaw before losing out to the suburban dream. After breaking out of prison, Griffin, his younger brother Dewey and a violent third-wheel named Kobish choose a random house on a quiet Indianapolis street to hide from the law.  The Hilliards (husband, wife, two kids) are held hostage until Griffin’s girlfriend arrives with their traveling money…which becomes tragically delayed.  Things become dangerously tense as Daniel Hillard (Fredric March) suspects his ...

Most filmmakers have at least one outlier in their resume;  a project that served as a proving ground or first break that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of their oeuvre.  Right now, Taylor Sheridan is sitting at the top of his profession, having earned critical respect  and  financial success as a screenwriter ( Sicario, Hell or High Water ), director ( Wind River ) and creative mastermind ( Yellowstone  and its many spinoffs).  But in 2011 he was making his directorial debut with  Vile , a nasty bit of  Saw  inspired torture porn that shows barely a glimmer of his future talent.   Kidnapped and locked-down in a barricaded home, 9 people awake with a medical device strapped to the back of their necks.  A video succinctly explains their situation.  They are unwilling participants in a  drug “harvesting” process in which chemicals produced by their brain during moments of extreme duress fi...

Produced at the height of the ‘90s post-modernism film movement,  The Dead Mother  (1993) is a thriller that disguises its inspirations quite well.  Like his contemporaries, director Juanma Bajo Ulloa embraces transgressive violence.  Like Hitchcock, he’s a bit of a sadistic show-off.  And like French New Wave auteurs Godard and Truffaut, he dresses it all up as something  more  than just another genre effort.  All those pretensions should be off-putting, but Ulloa’s film winds up being so pleased with itself you can’t help but skim the cream off the top. A career sociopath and sometime burglar, Ismael (Karra Elejalde) murders a woman and mentally cripples her daughter on a job gone wrong.  Years later he recognizes the surviving victim of his crime – Leire (Ana Alvarez) – at a clinic for special needs patients.  Fearing she’ll identify him, Ismael kidnaps her and returns to his hideout where Maite (Lio) – h...

Marleen Gorris’ first two films were brilliant precursors to a feminist uprising.   A Question of Silence  (1982) and  Broken Mirrors  (1984) featured women characters who had simply had enough of being dismissed, belittled and abused.  And they remain just as powerful and relevant (unfortunately) as the decade in which they were released.  Her third feature, 1990’s  The Last Island,  seems to offer a less confrontational solution to the battle of the sexes: just wait them out. After their plane crashes on a deserted island, the survivors – five men, two women and a dog – begin to suspect that a worldwide catastrophe has made them the only remnants of the human race.  Cooperation and camaraderie soon turn to suspicion and distrust as dwindling supplies and sexual tension threaten their island paradise.  As the only woman of childbearing age, Joanna (Shelagh McLeod) is pushed into the unwilling role of Eve…while e...