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If you didn’t live through the pre-VCR era, you might not understand the abnormal amount of excitement something like ABC’s Movie of the Week could generate. After all, short of theatrical reissues, there was no other way to see current or classic flicks. We also had to change channels and turn up the volume by hand, but that’s beside the point. While a fair number of major motion pictures popped up (in heavily edited form), you were just as likely to get a “copycat” production designed to spare network execs from paying for the real thing. Such is the case with this TV Terrors double feature, released by the horror specialists at Scream Factory. The Initiation of Sarah (1978) is a clone of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), minus the nudity, swears, Sissy Spacek and special effects. That obviously doesn’t leave much to work with. But that’s part of the retro charm of viewing these old made-for-TV horror rip-offs, many of which made as big an impression on the younger generation...

If you thought George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead said all there was to say about our consumer-obsessed society, you obviously missed Night of the Comet (1984), a likable and clever combination of I Am Legend and Valley Girl that pokes fun at the multiplex-in-a-mall culture. Of all the horror/action/comedy hybrids that popped up during the ‘80s, this one is likely the smartest and most enjoyable of them all. Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart, The Last Starfighter ) and Samantha (Kelli Maroney, Chopping Mall ) appear to be the only survivors of a comet-induced apocalypse that has reduced the rest of the population to piles of red dust. Those that escaped immediate death, however, are slowly zombified into dehydrated monsters, including a group of scientists holed up in an underground lab who want the two girls for testing. But Reggie and Sam are more interested in the same things they were interested in before the apocalypse: namely gossip, shopping and boys. Any synopsis makes N...

The World’s End , the third and perhaps final collaboration between director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, is a natural evolution of sorts. Their first theatrical foray, Shaun of the Dead , focused on a pair of emotionally stillborn pals defending themselves against an army of zombies. Hot Fuzz saw them paired up as essentially children masquerading as adults in a world of gratuitous action-film inspired violence. The World’s End brings things full circle, introducing a now mature and responsible group childhood chums who’ve conceded to a man that to function in the real world, you’ve got to grow up sometime. Well, everyone except Gary. While the whole gang’s back this time around, including welcome newcomers like Martin Freeman ( The Hobbit, Sherlock ) and Paddy Considine, there’s no mistaking this is Simon Pegg’s movie. As Gary, he represents the entire film’s contradictory philosophy in a nutshell: a true friend never outgrows his true friends. One h...

With science-fiction once again in vogue thanks to Star Wars and Alien , plenty of aging movie stars took their careers to space in hopes of staying relevant with increasingly “effects-centric” audiences: Sean Connery twice ( Meteor and Outland ), Roger Moore ( Moonraker ), Anthony Perkins ( The Black Hole ) and Kirk Douglas, who hedged his bets by co-starring with poster girl Farrah Fawcett in Saturn 3 (1980), a sort of “Frankenstein in space” story set at an isolated research facility orbiting the ringed planet. Charged with growing food for an increasingly desperate Earth population, Alex and Adam (Fawcett and Douglass respectively) have created a private universe in their underground greenhouse. This Garden of Eden is interrupted by arrival of Benson (Harvey Keitel), a mysterious liaison who delivers a new type of advanced robot to assist with their harvest. But Benson is actually a mentally imbalanced imposter whose hormones take over when he sets eyes on Alex. Desperate to ...

Creating a successful horror icon is harder than it looks. Sure, Michael, Jason and Freddy make it look easy: a snazzy mask, the right accessories and a signature catchphrase or two. But check out The Horror Show (1989), produced at the tail end of the waning slasher craze, and you’ll see what I mean. Max Jenke is one bad dude. He’s put a lot of mileage on his meat cleaver and is now strapped to the electric chair to pay for his crimes. But as the cop who put him away watches, Jenke absorbs most of the juice and swears vengeance…just before collapsing into a lifeless heap. That’s one of a couple prologues in producer Sean S. Cunningham’s ( Friday the 13 th ) ill-conceived attempt to introduce a new serial killer in the cinematic pantheon. Jenke (which sounds a lot like the exclamation Velma makes on Scooby Doo ) is played by Brion James, probably most memorable as the psychotic replicant in Blade Runner . Here he just bugs his eyes out a lot and emits an evil high-pitched gi...

While it took the Terminator franchise three installments to get around to the idea of a “female Terminator,” 1991’s Eve of Destruction beat it to the punch by a good 12 years. But in this case, getting there first isn’t necessarily a good thing. With the unlikely choice of Gregory Hines as a high-ranking government secret agent assigned to destroy a runaway fembot before she goes nuclear, the film plays like good synopsis that either ran out of ideas…or ran out of money to execute them. The most crucial flaw in Eve of Destruction certainly isn’t Hines, who’s proven himself to be charming and believable in action roles before ( Wolfen, Running Scared ). It’s the fact that the film gives him nothing to do. After a quick intro setting of the concept of “Eve” – an experimental android programmed with the thoughts and feelings of its creator, Dr. Eve Simmons (both roles played by European actress Renee Soutenjijk) - the two characters are essentially kept apart for the rest of the...

It’s tough to be critical of films that were essential to the development of cinema itself. After all, the challenges faced by F.W. Murnau in shooting Nosferatu in 1922 were incomparably more difficult than those that came even 5 or 10 years later. We’re talking about the creation of a cinematic language: wide-shot, medium shot, close-up, mise en scene, essential filmic vocabulary tools that are mostly instinctual today. Not to mention introducing the world’s most famous bloodsucker 9 years before Bela strapped on his cape. Murnau had made several shorts and features in his native Germany before adapting (without legal permission) Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula , for the screen. The result, when viewed with modern eyes, can be tedious at times considering Stoker’s story has been told and retold from so many different perspectives. And the acting, although perfectly in keeping with stage-inspired techniques of the time, remains a tough sell. What makes Nosferatu an undisputed cl...

John Carpenter hit the ground running with his first full feature, Assault on Precinct 13 , in 1976. As a writer / director / composer almost all his stylistic virtues were already in place: throbbing synth music score, carefully composed shots, anti-authoritarian hero, and some studio system spit and polish on a film produced well outside of it. If Dark Star, his 1974 sci-fi collaboration with Dan O’Bannon ( Alien ), proved Carpenter could point and shoot on budget, Assault on Precinct 13 saw him poised to break it big. A modern-day variation on Howard Hawks Rio Bravo (1959), the film finds a mismatched group of cops and prisoners fighting for survival against a faceless horde of Los Angeles gang members out to avenge one of their own. Lt. Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) is the new cop on the job assigned to help shut down a ghetto area police station. A wayward prison bus drops famous criminal Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Justin) in their ill-prepared laps just as a panic-stricken fa...

In 1978, the same year Christopher Walken would rise to national prominence in The Deer Hunter , he also starred in an odd, wandering western tale as Mr. Rainbow, a bounty hunter with a heart of gold who becomes the de facto protector of an indentured servant (Margot Kidder, starring in Superman the same year as well) while on a hunt for Montezuma’s gold. A thesis project for director David Leeds – who dropped out of UCLA to complete it – Shoot the Sun Down is an unfortunate mess that probably never should have made it to theaters. But 36 years later, it does capture everything about Walken that makes him such a unique actor and so much fun to watch on screen…even when he’s dressed up like the world’s most uncomfortable cowboy. The film was originally released as Sante Fe 1836 , a reference to the Alamo, which pops as a throwaway joke in the finale. But under any title Leeds’ film is a collection of western clichés cut together with no rhyme or reason. Scenes fade to black just...

Anthology films are like a Chinese buffet: no matter how poor the quality, you’re bound to find something you like. Body Bags (1993), Showtime’s one-shot answer to HBO’s successful Tales from the Crypt series, is actually more like a sit-down restaurant. Director John Carpenter ( Halloween ) serves as our horror host through three creepy, comic and gruesome stories filled with genre icon cameos and inside-jokes. In “The Gas Station” a woman’s first night behind the cash register turns into a fight for survival against a serial killer. Segment two stars Stacy Keach as a balding middle-aged man whose miracle cure backfires when his own follicles run rampant. And in the finale, “Eye,” Mark Hamill plays a minor leaguer whose eye transplant has him seeing ghostly visions of murder, mayhem and death. None of stories in Body Bags are strong enough to stand on their own. So it’s a good thing they’re not really designed to. John Carpenter himself directs the first two and also plays ...

Mindwarp , a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi gore film produced by Fangoria Magazine in 1992, is a cup half-full, cup half-empty proposition. In the plus column, it stars Bruce Campbell ( The Evil Dead ) and Angus Scrimm (Phantasm ), two genre icons who give it their all no matter how low-budget or poorly conceived the film around them happens to be. And despite being the brainchild of a publication dedicated to glorifying the grossest moments in movie history, the film surprisingly chooses to emphasize ideas over shock effects. Yet there’s no mistaking Mindwarp for anything other than an ambitious copycat slogging through the direct-to-video ditches. And it’s an odd release choice for Twilight Time, who usually focus on lesser known but more widely respected classics from studio back catalogs. But for those with an affection for the material - or Bruce Campbell in particular, who never quite got a fair chance at being a big-screen action hero - this blu-ray debut will likely be an u...

Ostensibly The Other (1972) could be lumped in with several other “bad seed” movies that popped up during the ‘70s like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen . But writer Thomas Tryon’s screenplay (based on his own novel) differs from those successful films in two very significant ways: 1) It’s told almost exclusively from a child’s perspective and 2) The guy with the pointy horns and forked tail is nowhere in sight. It’s the former that plays the biggest role in the film’s structure. In a movie about keeping secrets, Tryon’s script struggles to keep a real whopper under wraps until about the one-hour mark. Up until then, The Other could pass for an elegiac coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of bucolic rural America just before the onset of WW2. The idea of true “evil” arising in such an unlikely setting is one of the film’s greatest assets. Twins Niles and Holland Perry (played by Chris & Martin Udvarnoky) are flip sides of the same coin; Niles being the ...

The success of the original Django in 1966 prompted a flood of unofficial sequels overseas, many of them simply slapping “Django” on the poster even though there were no characters with that name in the film. It was marketing by association, pure and simple. Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) at least gets the name right but isn’t a direct sequel either, which one supposes is part of the post-modern charm. What’s more surprising is that history did not repeat itself this time around. Meaning even though there’s a stockpile of Django films in some Raiders of the Lost Ark -style warehouse waiting to see the light of day on home video, very few companies were quick to capitalize on the name recognition. Raro Video is a bit late to the party with their release of Hanging for Django , but it exemplifies all the aforementioned qualities of a latter-day Django imitator. As directed by Sergio Garonne, the film is much more in line with Leone’s revisionist Westerns starring Clint E...

Warner Brothers’ 1946 thriller The Beast with Five Fingers is the first notable film featuring a “disembodied hand” as the main menace. It’s a tough act to pull off, which is why most other hands going solo have played it for laughs ( The Addam’s Family, Evil Dead 2 ) rather than straight-up scares. Here, a famous pianist’s only functioning appendage appears to seek revenge after death by strangling those interfering with the details of his final will and testament. Peter Lorre, who’d already dealt with murderous limbs in Mad Love , seems to know something he’s not sharing with the rest of the potential victims. Had Beast with Five Fingers been produced at Universal, who specialized in straightforward tales of the supernatural, it likely would have lost much of its psychological subtlety. Warner goes the classy route (well, as classy as a disembodied hand can be ) and turns the film into a The Old Dark House mystery, making it fairly obvious that the hand is being “directed” by...

One of Britain’s 39 prosecuted “video nasties” from the 1984 Video Recording Act which had authorities raiding video stores nationwide to prevent the warping of impressionable young minds, House on Straw Hill (1976) actually earns much it’s torrid reputation…unlike more obviously absurd films like Zombie and Blood Feast which also made the list. Starring Udo Kier ( Suspiria ) and Linda Hayden ( Taste the Blood of Dracula ) in a sexually charged standoff at an isolated country estate, there are plenty of crude attempts to titillate, but also an intriguingly twisted mystery underneath the filth. Author Paul Martin (Kier) is struggling to complete the follow-up to his bestselling first novel. The arrival of an attractive hired secretary, Linda, (Hayden) speeds up the writing process, but distracts him with lustful thoughts and, ultimately, sexual frustration. It soon becomes obvious that Linda has a secret agenda; one that includes manipulating Martin and his drop-in lover (played b...

While the major studios do a fairly good job of documenting their own movie history, it’s up to niche companies like Blue Underground to unearth cinema’s seedier footnotes like Snuff (1976), which inspired a good share of controversy from anti-violence protestors and even prompted an official FBI investigation into the rumors surrounding real-life murders captured on film. Purchased for $5000 by producer Allan Shackleton, Snuff began as a slapdash production from the filmmaking team of Roberta and Michael Findlay called Slaughter . Filmed in Argentina with a plot mixing Mason family-style murders with South American melodrama, there is little to recommend about the first hour and fifteen minutes (despite director Nicolas Winding Refn’s appreciation of its “rock ‘n rock aesthetic” included in the extras). But Shackleton’s 10-minute coda, filmed five years after the fact, made all the marketing difference. As the final scene of Slaughter fades, we widen out to reveal the filmmaker...

As performers go, there are no more icons of horror at work today. Actors like Karloff, Lugosi, Lee and Cushing were pigeonholed, much to their distress, as masters of the macabre and allowed to do little else but dress up – or combat - one monster after another for decades. It was a living. But many of them found more resentment than enjoyment in their elevated status amongst genre fans that grew up idolizing their work on-screen. Not so for Vincent Price. Arguably the most erudite performer in the pantheon of classic horror films, the actor always seemed to relish his role as a twisted torturer, mad scientist, devil worshipper or vicious villain…whatever the case may be. But he also appreciated his status within cinema history. Rather than rebelling against his title as the “king of horror,” he accepted his accolades with open arms. And that fan-pleasing attitude is on full display in Scream Factory’s new blu-ray box set, The Vincent Price Collection , which includes six of...

Once a film sinks into the quicksand of Public Domain, meaning the original copyright owner’s rights have expired, you can pretty much forget about ever seeing a decent copy of it again. Walmart bargain bins are chock full of 20, 30 even 100 movie collections containing pitiful transfers of poor neglected films that are essentially sold into cinematic slavery. Most companies would never bother to remaster and re-release a movie that has already flooded the market with shoddy copies. But Kino Classics does just that with 1940’s The Devil Bat , a PRC title commonly referred to as “poverty row” horror flick starring Bela Lugosi in a mad scientist revenge story. Lugosi, still quite marketable at this point in his career, plays a bitter cosmetics inventor who sold off his interest in the company and never reaped the financial rewards his partners enjoyed. His revenge comes in the form of an oversized bat trained to kill anyone wearing a special aftershave lotion. After the bizarre m...

History has lumped in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed with a more straightforward war movies like A Bridge Too Far and Midway ; ambitious but rather boring all-star productions that were old-fashioned even when they were made. But in actuality it’s far closer to the alternative-history scenario of Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards . Hitler doesn’t die in a movie theater, but Winston Churchill does come close to eating a bullet on a veranda. With a ridiculously well-known cast (Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasance, even Larry Hagman) and just as much talent behind the camera with director John Sturges ( The Great Escape ) and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz ( Live and Let Die ), there’s almost not enough room on the poster to fit them all in. Based on a novel by Jack Higgins, the challenge of bouncing between so many major and minor characters – not to mention their phony accents – seems too much for the film to handle initially. But as the plot develops, Th...

As decades go, the 1970s was the devil’s playground. At least…on movie screens. Beginning with Rosemary’s Baby in 1968 and continuing with The Exorcist, The Omen and dozens of pea-soup spewing imitators, ‘Ol Scratch was a busy guy right up through the Reagan era, which kicked off with his appearance in The Amityville Horror (1979) and its two sequels, Amityville 2: The Possession (1982) and Amityville 3D (1983). The latter two now premiere on blu-ray for the first time, along with the original, as part of Scream Factory’s The Amityville Horror Trilogy box set. There aren’t many defenders left to stand up for the James Brolin / Margot Kidder adaptation that caused such fuss at the time of its release. Much of the attention the film garnered was due to the “true story” angle posited by Jay Anson’s book which detailed the events that befell the Lutz family after purchasing their dream home…which just happened to be built directly on an Indian burial ground. After suffering throu...

The idea of making a sequel to Psycho would seem misguided, at best. Not to mention potentially embarrassing for all involved. But as Hollywood has proven, there’s no property that’s “untouchable”…even one with the great Alfred Hitchcock’s name attached. With the success of the slasher genre in full swing, particularly Halloween, Universal went ahead with Psycho 2 (1983) a continuation of the story of Norman Bates, now released from psychiatric care and returning home after 22 years. But is he truly “cured” or is the memory of his mother only waiting at the top of the stairs? Directed by Richard Franklin, a Hitchcock devotee and pupil, there’s an obvious – and much appreciated - intent to keep things classy. The script by Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child’s Play) is respectful and sympathetic to Norman (played again by Anthony Perkins), now almost a victim himself and persecuted by Lila Loomis for the death of her sister. Norman’s short-lived job at the local diner introduces h...

Set just a few months later, Psycho 3 (1986) picks up with Norman now a full-tilt loony once again. His fascination with a Marion Crane look-alike (Diana Scarwid) prompts an ill-fated romance that Mother disapproves of…and we all know what happens with women Mother doesn’t like. This time around, Perkin’s himself gets in the director’s chair and does a surprisingly good job. The kill sequences are a bit more modern and not afraid to show some gore. If anything works against him, it’s Perkins’ tendency to include references to the original film. That sort of wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff is exactly what you would have expected out of the first sequel and isn’t really necessary. The script by Charles Edward Pogue (who would reboot The Fly just a year later) works in enough humor and interesting characters all on its own, including a scene-stealing Jeff Fahey as a rock n’ roll drifter. Perkins seems to be aiming for the cheap seats in an attempt to boost Norman’s stature amongst new...

For cinephiles, the first question one asks upon watching The Disappearance (1977) is “why haven’t I seen this…or even heard of it!” Starring Donald Sutherland, David Warner, John Hurt, David Hemmings and Christopher Plummer, the cast alone only deepens the mystery behind the film’s unceremonious shelving by an uninterested distributor which drastically recut and rescored director Stuart Cooper’s existential hitman drama…then let it languish for nearly 35 years. Labeled as too “European” for a mainstream audience, The Disappearance has made a miraculous hi-def reappearance thanks to indie label Twilight Time, whose 3000 copy limited edition premieres a startlingly beautiful 91 minute cut and the full 101 minute director’s cut on standard def. Donald Sutherland made some excellent choices in the ‘70s. Following his famous roles in M.A.S.H. and Klute , the actor chose a number of eccentric projects including Nicolas Roeg’s haunting Don’t Look Now and the best adaptation of Jack Fi...

Fed up with the studio filmmaking experience after Starman and Christine , director John Carpenter went back to his low-budget horror roots with Prince of Darkness (1987), a $3 million dollar quickie that offered him total control from beginning to end. Reuniting with actors from many of his past projects – Donald Pleasance ( Halloween, Escape from New York ), Victor Wong and Dennis Dun ( Big Trouble in Little China ) – the film offers a creatively ambitious take on the apocalypse as Satan returns to earth courtesy sub-atomic particles trapped in a jar of swirling green goo. Actually, the ideas Carpenter uses to explain the bizarre happenings at work here are darn near inexplicable. It’s all quantum mechanics, supernovas and alternate dimensions. But when spoken in a menacing tone of voice and shot with his usual menacing style, it raises goosebumps nonetheless. And despite all the technological double-talk, it really comes down to ten people trapped in a church on the wrong side...

It’s tempting to give great directors a free pass when it comes to their, shall we say, “weaker” films. John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, even the great Alfred Hitchcock had his fair share of clunkers but suffered little ill effect to his reputation in the annals of cinematic history. So shouldn’t Mario Bava get the same treatment? The maestro of gothic-giallo Italian horror films has several certified classics to his credit ( Black Sunday and Blood and Black Lace the most notable), but stretched out his career with several films that, even by his own admission, weren’t up to his high standards. As explained by historian Tom Weaver in the disc’s commentary, Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) was a bit of a slog for Bava to complete due to the usual budget and time constraints plus intrusive producers. And it’s a bit of a slog as a viewer, too. The story – several couples on an isolated island retreat fighting over a million-dollar business deal that leads to murder – has all the ...

SyFy Channel movies have now become synonymous with cheesy Saturday night fare like Sharknado and Snowmageddon. And while there’s a certain level of enjoyment to be had scoffing at poorly rendered flying sharks devouring Tara Reid, it’d be nice to have a flip side of the coin now and then: a made-for-TV movie that actually attempts to, I don’t know, actually scare somebody! Dead Souls premiered on Chiller , another network not exactly known for being too discriminating about their schedule. But the product this time around is better than average and often superior to some recent big screen scares, if you keep your expectations in check. The film has a humdinger of an opening as a father brutally murders his wife, two kids and the family dog. Only the youngest son escapes the massacre, raised by his aunt with no knowledge of his scandalous past. But when he inherits the family estate, he returns to his birthplace and unwittingly awakens the spirits of his deceased relatives…an...

Despite arguments to the contrary, most foreign filmmakers have a deep-seated jealousy towards Hollywood and all its many resources. From a technical and financial perspective, it’s just too hard to compete head to head with the spectacle that the U.S. can put on the screen. But as computer effects have evolved, costs have dropped and it suddenly becomes feasible that a couple of Norwegian filmmakers could produce Kon Tiki (2012), the Academy Award Nominated story of Thor Heyerdahl’s insane goal to cross the Pacific on a crude raft simply to prove his scientific theory of prehistoric migration. Heyerdahl himself earned a nomination for the documentary film he made of the journey in 1947. And while that account may be historically accurate, it doesn’t have the spit and polish of directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg’s film, which recreates not only the ocean crossing with harrowingly realistic effects but the period setting and backdrops too. In short, Kon Tiki has everyth...

Of the much-heralded crop of ‘70s directors – Scorsese, Spielberg, and Coppola among them – to emerge from the ruins of the studio system, Brian De Palma seems the least significant by critical comparison. Perhaps because he was labeled more of an “imitator” than an “innovator”; lifting the themes, characters, music and wholesale camera movements of Alfred Hitchcock to elevate his career. Even the harshest critic couldn’t argue that De Palma’s work is technically wondrous to behold. But just as often, the material on the page couldn’t compete with what he was doing with his camera. Body Double (1984) followed the commercially successful but equally controversial Scarface (1983) which found the director in the familiar position of defending his supposed endorsement of racism, misogynism and overt on-screen violence. It was a return to the Hitchcockian thriller format that served him quite well in Dressed to Kill and Blow Out . But, perhaps as a snide sort of revenge for all that...

The most memorable war movies are those that use the military conflict as nothing more than a backdrop. Apocalypse Now, Paths of Glory, The Bridge on the River Kwai ; all war movies by definition but with more subtext than actual armed combat. Australian director Tom Jeffrey’s The Odd Angry Shot (1979) intentionally avoids most of the controversy around his country’s participation in Vietnam. It’s not a protest film, it’s not political film and – oddly enough – it’s not an angry film. It’s a coming-of-age story not unlike Oliver Stone’s Platoon , but with half the angst and twice the beer. Bill (John Jarratt) is a naïve kid shipped off into a M.A.S.H.- style barracks on the edge of the jungle, partnered up with a hodge-podge of semi-professional soldiers and newbies like himself. The film’s plot is as standard-issue as a pair of boots: some dangerous missions, a little R & R, some colorful camp hijinks and the eventual trauma of losing a friend. A little patience goes a lo...

For a movie with a title as morbid as The House of Seven Corpses ( (1974), you probably couldn’t find a more family friendly piece of horror real estate. More often that not, the film looks and feels just like similar made-for-TV product produced in the same era ( Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, etc) with a cast of past-their-prime stars and a plot not quite sensational enough for the big screen. That’s probably to be expected, since writer/ director Paul Harrison biggest claim to fame at the time were several episodes of H. R. Pufnstuf. Scary, indeed! Although House actually played theatrically, any notoriety it still has today is thanks to local late-night creature features and various home-video releases, all of which made the movie look even more low-rent that it actually is. Now debuting on a blu-ray / DVD combo thanks to Severin Films, one can finally see the movie we’d all been missing…and we haven’t been missing much. Oh, there’s so some fun to be had watching the great Jo...

Up until a decade or so ago, animation could be divided into two categories: Disney and everybody else. By its very nature, the animation process was so labor intensive and commercially risky that very few independents ever achieved notoriety besides an odd Oscar nomination now and then during a lull in the show. Ralph Bakshi is one of the rare exceptions. Fritz the Cat (1972), a lewd, crude and X-rated cartoon based on the work of R. Crumb was a bonafide sensation and a legitimate hit, which brought Bakshi to the attention of other producers quick to capitalize on his uniquely adult approach to the previously kid-friendly animation genre. Heavy Traffic, released just a year later in 1973, provided a bit more mature palette. The self-reflexive story follows a struggling cartoonist caught between his obnoxious Jewish-Italian parents and a street-smart female bartender who shows him just what kind of hard knocks it takes to survive in the city. Fully embracing the squalor that i...

Tower Block fits quite nicely into the new catch-all category I like to call inter- tainment : not quite high-concept enough for a theatrical release, but with much better production values than your average YouTube channel, the story by writer James Moran ( Severance ) has echoes of ‘70s era grit mixed with a Rod Serling-esque morality play as a sniper keeps a dozen top floor residents of a condemned tenament pinned down as revenge for refusing to assist with the investigation of a murder in their building. Die Hard meets Dirty Harry . Towering Inferno meets Twilight Zone . The film mixes and matches characters and clichés quite liberally, but is assisted by a surprisingly able cast (including Jack O’Connell who played an equally nasty teen in the British thriller Eden Lake ) and enough “what would you do” moments to keep you sticking around for what turns out to be a blandly predictable conclusion. But Tower Block proves that a simple scenario well told can be engaging even...

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who miss the latex-bursting, neon goo-filled days of movies like Street Trash (1987) and those who say a little prayer every day in hopes that nothing like it ever gets made again. Here’s a pop quiz that will tell you which side of the fence you’re on. Do you enjoy: Necrophilia? Playing keep-away with a dismembered penis? Setting hobos on fire? If you answered yes (or even chuckled) at any of the following then you’re in the “maybe” camp. To be sure, Street Trash isn’t the most offensive movie ever made. In fact, there’s an undercurrent of playful cinematic innocence around the whole thing. But it’s interrupted by moments of bad taste that are best left to those predisposed to it. Did I mention a cop sticks a finger down his throat to vomit on top of the guy whose ass he just kicked? Well, he does. The actual story revolves around a dozen or so homeless characters fighting for their place in the local junkyard and drinkin...

For a company that specialized in period horror movies it’s odd that Hammer Films never made a Jack the Ripper picture until 1971; and then they made two of them! Both Hands of the Ripper and Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde deal with the famous serial killer in unusual ways. The latter is a gender bending twist that approaches the story from a purely fantastic perspective. Hands of the Ripper ’s “possession” angle may be no less plausible, but its psychological underpinning makes it a bit classier in approach and execution. Opening with the Ripper himself on the run from an angry mob of torch bearing citizens, his young daughter witnesses her notorious father stab her mother to death. Flash forward some years later where the orphaned girl, Anna (Angharad Rees), is now working for a medium as a conduit to the spirit world. But her past returns to haunt her. Bright light puts her in a trance-like state, opening the door to spiritual possession by the Ripper who uses her hands to ...