Movieline Online

In the words of reviewer Glenn Erickson, better known as  cinesavant ,  “Life is too short to watch any more Jess Franco movies!”  Alternately hailed as a misunderstood genius or a barely proficient hack, few directors have had more of their work  rediscovered  during the DVD / Blu-ray era than Franco, a Spanish jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none with over 200 films to his credit (that we  know  about)!  Most of his work slummed in the sexploitation arena, where skin was essential, a coherent story was optional and focus on pretty much every shot was questionable.  But Franco could work at a competent level from time to time, mostly when partnered with notorious producer Harry Alan Towers, who convinced former Hammer star Christopher Lee to appear in several sleazy productions, among them 1970’s  Night of the Blood Monster .  As King James most merciless lawgiver, Judge Jeffreys (Lee) revels in the torture and mutilat...

There are two schools of thought on sequels:  employ the  “same but different” approach or try something completely unexpected.  The Inspector Wears Skirts 2  (1989) certainly isn’t out to reinvent the wheel.  With only minor tweaks to the battle-of-the-sexes scenario established in the first film, this Jackie Chan produced follow-up repurposes just about every plot point.   Which I guess makes the unspoken third rule of sequels: “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Still in training for their elite women-only commando unit, this year’s class is joined by four new recruits who need to earn their stripes.  Their male counterparts are as misogynistic as ever, taking every opportunity to prove their physical superiority.  But the girls aren’t immune from some in-fighting themselves, whether it’s over skills in the field…or skills in the bedroom.  But teamwork is essential when a terrorist organization kidnaps...

Italy wasn’t the only film industry that enjoyed blending genres.  Japan had a rich tradition of  jidaigeki  and  chambara  – or sword fighting films – set against the political chaos of the medieval and early modern era.  Kurosawa’s work might be the most well-known internationally, but as pop culture shifted in the late ‘60s, so did the studios’ approach.   Killer’s Mission ,  The Fort of Death  and  Eight Men to Kill , now recognized collectively as  The Bounty Hunter Trilogy , cobbled together spy film and spaghetti western trends to create a samurai anti-hero, Shikoro Ichibei, whose moral compass often took priority over his compensation package. Killer’s Mission  (1969) has the most traditional plot of the bunch as Ichibei is hired by the shogunate to prevent an ambitious clan from buying a shipload of weapons from a Dutch trading vessel.  This straightforward narrative from director Shigehiro Oza...

The west coast always struggled to create a creepy atmosphere on screen.  All that southern California sunshine just doesn’t lend itself to ghostly apparitions or gothic castles.  But  Tormented  (1960) gives it a good try, staging its opening scene in an abandoned lighthouse where blackmail turns into murder - and one cover up leads to another.  Director Bert I. Gordon, better known for his giant-sized - but low-budget - monster movies, works well at this level, turning in a film that delivers small scares but perhaps his most  professional finished product. Tom Stewart (played by genre regular Richard Carlson) is a fairly successful jazz pianist whose impending marriage to Meg Hubbard (Susan Gordon) will put him in an entirely new tax bracket.  Trouble is his old flame, Vi (Juli Reding), isn’t taking this lying down.  After  allowing  her to fall to her death in the opening scene, Tom is haunted by disembo...

Japanese horror (or  J-Horror  for short) came along just in the nick of time.  By 2002, franchise icons like Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers were barely pulling in an audience and one-shot stabs in the dark like  Ghost Ship  and  Feardotcom were uninspired attempts at creating stand-alone scares.  Meanwhile, in the land of the rising sun, the horror genre was giving birth to new generation of angry spirits that harkened back to a less gratuitous - but no less grotesque - menagerie of monsters.  Director Hideo Nakata launched the J-Horror craze with 1998's  Ringu , remade as  The Ring  in 2002 by Gore Verbinski. By that time, Nakata had already made a sequel himself and was pushing things in even more interesting directions with  Dark Water , a psychological drama with a supernatural edge.  While the selling point here (and in the 2005 remake starring Jennifer Connelly) remained creepy ghost girls and a...

John Wayne was an actor who knew his limitations.  He rarely ventured outside the western or war genres and when he  did  – like in John Ford’s  The Quiet Man  – it was with the safety net of a director accustomed to his skill set.  But despite a career bereft of any particular standout performance, Wayne could deliver a line of dialogue as good as anyone in the business.  His final film,  The Shootist  (1976), serves them up on a silver platter, providing a “farewell tour” of tired gunslinger clichés that the old pro knocks out of the park one after the other. Looking for nothing more a quiet place to die after receiving a cancer diagnosis, infamous gunfighter J.B. Brooks (Wayne) takes a room in the boarding house of Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall) and her starstruck son, Gillom (Ron Howard).  But a legend like Brooks attracts the wrong sort of attention, specifically young pistoleros out to make a name for themselves...

Just as new generations rediscover the music  Pink Floyd  and the  Grateful Dead , filmmakers are also partial to dusting off inspirations that have been on the shelf for a while.  The fallout from Tarantino’s first two films – Reservoir Dogs  and  Pulp Fiction  – lasted well into the early aughts until passing the baton to directors like Guy Ritchie who added their own up-tempo style.  With  Punto Roj0  (2021), Argentinian director Nic Loreti brings things full circle with a non-linear noir-influenced plot that hits like Uma Thurman snorting a faceful of cocaine.  “ I said goddamn!”   The movie begins with Diego (Demián Salomón), a thug with an encyclopedic knowledge of soccer history, killing time in his car by answering questions on a radio call-in quiz show. Now and then he stops to check on the passenger bound and gagged in his trunk: Nesquick, a low-level middleman who (as we discover in flashback) has scre...