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It’s a safe bet that the upcoming Godzilla will bear little resemblance the 28 Toho films that came before it (yes, we’re discounting the 1998 American version entirely…although it’s not without its charms). With that many onscreen appearances, the only truly consistent element of the franchise is its miniaturized special effects and man-in-suit creations, which are laughably out-of-date for most modern audiences. “Most” meaning those who would have absolutely zero interest in the eight remastered blu-rays just released by Sony covering the big G’s adventures from 1991 to 2004. Beginning with the return of Godzilla’s most famous nemesis in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah and ending with the all-out kung-fu insanity that is Godzilla: Final Wars , each film is given a significant bump in quality along with the correct aspect ratio and original Japanese language tracks. Collectors will simply buy them all in bulk, but if you’re a bit more choosy, here’s the lowdown on which double featur...

An amateurish mix of Halloween and Animal House produced at the height of the slasher craze, Final Exam (1981) is nevertheless an appealing sort of horror film comfort food. With minimal flashes of nudity, barely any blood and a killer who couldn’t even afford a hockey mask, the film won’t earn many thrills or chills. But its nostalgic appeal is inherent in the cast of stereotypical jocks, nerds, sluts and virgins who make up the slasher mythology. In fact, the opening sequence – with two co-eds getting busy in the backseat of a car – plays almost like the genre spoof Student Bodies which came out the same year. But Final Exam is more earnest in its attempts to craft a compelling story. That it fails to do so at almost every turn is what makes it so entertaining. After a fraternity stages a phony terrorist attack during pledge week, the local sheriff isn’t taking calls about serial killers very seriously. Which is too bad, because a psycho actually is stalking the campus, p...

Although Jaws (1975) is credited as the first modern blockbuster, director William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) actually got there first and created the some sort of theatrical phenomena. While Spielberg was able to use his film a springboard to further his career, Friedkin just treaded water. By the time Sorcerer (1977) was released four years later, the industry had changed. Audiences wanted escapism, and Friedkin’s sprawling remake of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) was simply not marquee material. But as is the case with so many films that fail to find an audience in their own era, Sorcerer has earned back a large degree critical respect. In fact, it’s aged better than the film it was based on, crafted with a rough documentary-style approach and a series of arrhythmia-inducing suspense sequences that hold up as some of the best work of the 1970s…by any director! Featuring an international cast and an impressive amount of foreign locations, Sorcerer stars Roy Schneide...

Even die-hard Godzilla fans will admit that the idea of a 60-meter tall turtle stomping across Japan is patently ridiculous. Not to mention that he breathes fire and travels through the air like a jet-powered Frisbee. And yet that’s part of the charm of the Gamera series, the only legitimate contender to Toho’s “King of the Monsters” crown. Popping up for years on TV creature features across the country (and appearing in a slew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes), the Gamera films seemed to know they were second-best when it came to giant monster movies…but damn if they weren’t going to have a good time! In 2010, Shout Factory came to the digital rescue by scooping up the rights to all of Gamera’s screen appearances and releasing them on a series of stand-alone and double-feature DVDs with extras like audio commentaries and a half-hour retrospective. Fast-forward four years later and Mill Creek Entertainment is releasing the same eight movies across two blu-ray collection...

Although he’s now a two-time Oscar winner, Quentin Tarantino is still an arrogant video clerk at heart. Which explains why he’s so eager to pass along rental recommendations like Big Bad Wolves (2013), an Israeli thriller that would likely have gathered dust in the foreign section of most mom-and-pop video stores. Tarantino’s tastes are so well known, his name becomes a bona fide seal of approval. So when his quote on the front of the box proclaims this the “Best Film of the Year,” it’s like a winning a golden statuette without all the pomp and circumstance. And in this case, QT is actually onto something. Big Bad Wolves is compulsively watchable despite showcasing the most horrendous aspects of human behavior. It uses pedophilia as a major plot device, debates the most effective means of torture, and ends with a depressing flourish that ranks right up there with Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. Yet filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado are courageous enough, daring...

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Indie horror films haven’t changed much in the past few decades. They’re still the most profitable cost vs. risk genre out there for aspiring producers and directors to make a quick buck. Look no further than the French / German co-production Dead Shadows , which made it into a few film festivals and now premieres on hi-def courtesy of Scream Factory. Director David Cholewa wears his influences on his sleeves – or in this case the posters plastered to his main character’s walls. Lifting an almost random collection of elements from John Carpenter’s The Thing and 1980’s Night of the Comet , the film introduces a few interesting characters, sets up a mysterious back-story, then proceeds to ditch all of it in favor of showcasing its shot-on-budget visual effects…which are admittedly impressive. But that doesn’t excuse Dead Shadows rather obvious agenda as a calling card film rather than delivering a cohesive story from beginning to end. Chris (Fabian Wolfram, who looks like a James...

Alfred Hitchcock never officially groomed a successor. But there were plenty of applicants eager to take over the title of “Master of Suspense” by the time his last film, Family Plot , ran through projectors in 1976. That same year, Brian De Palma’s Carrie used Hitchcock’s technique as a springboard to launch a stylistic assault of operatic pretensions. This amplified experience became De Palma’s cinematic signature, creating a Hitchcock highlight reel that only used the most grandiose and elaborate camera set-ups. Meanwhile, Australian director Richard Franklin launched his own bid to take over the master’s title with Patrick (1978), a film that steals just as much from Hitchcock’s bag of tricks, but on a more fundamental level. If Carrie co-opted the showy ingenuity of Vertigo , Patrick embodies the more down-and-dirty aesthetic of Psycho , filtering its thrills through cleverly defined characters and audience manipulation. Comatose for the last three years, Patrick (Robert ...

Borne of some bizarre ménage a trois between Halloween, Happy Days and Singin’ in the Rain , the New Zealand import Dead Kids (1981) is a genuine oddity no matter which genre you choose to file it under. Released in the U.S. under the title Strange Behavior and set in the American Midwest, teenagers in this small college town are being programmed to kill after signing up for experiments with the local mad scientist. These remote-controlled murders pique the interest of the local sheriff (Michael Murphy) whose family history is tangled up in this far-fetched medical conspiracy. At first glance, Dead Kids comes off as just another slasher clone. And an unusually clumsy one at that. But when teens at a party break into a choreographed dance number to Lou Christie’s 1966 hit “Lightnin’ Strikes,” suddenly all expectations go out the window. Co-written by Academy Award Winner Bill Condon (whose resume with Chicago and Dreamgirls confirms his musical aspirations), that scene is p...

Part of a trio of Ozploitation titles out this month (with Dead Kids and Patrick still to come), Thirst (1979) is one of the more unusual vampire films you’re ever likely to run across…and unusually well-made, to boot. Using a Rosemary’s Baby meets The Howling concept, director Rod Hardy manages to mess with your mind and the conventions of the horror genre all at the same time. We don’t know much about Kate (Chantal Contouri) before she’s kidnapped and brought to a commune-type facility. Her abductors are a mysterious, well-organized group who maintain a “farm” of human victims, using an on-campus medical facility to draw and store their blood while keeping everyone in a semi-stoned state of consciousness. Are they truly “vampires” or merely affluent weirdoes convinced that consuming human blood will give them power and influence? And why is Kate so important? Thirst doesn’t get around to answering every question, but that’s what makes it such a riveting experience. It’s ...

It’s tempting with a film as obscure as Meet Him and Die (1976) to write-up an entire history of Italian “polizieschi” (cop/gangster films) so one can understand how it fits into the bigger picture of Italian cinema’s propensity to run a good thing into the ground, creating one copy after another until the box-office returns finally dry up. But if you’re interested, the extras on Raro Video’s new blu-ray do a pretty good job of that for you. Suffice to say that director Franco Prosperi’s film sits right in the middle ground of a genre that had a few highs and a lot more lows, stealing most of its cues from American titles like The Godfather and Dirty Harry. It stars pretty boy Ray Lovelock as undercover cop Massimo Toriani, sent to prison to stage an escape for infamous crime lord Giulianelli (Martin Balsam, Psycho ) and get cozy with his underworld contacts. Massimo, however, has a more personal angle: getting revenge against the two bodyguards who shot and paralyzed his poor ...

Director Victor Salva will likely never read a review of one of his films that doesn’t mention his previous child molestation conviction, and question the fact that he is allowed to make movies at all. It’s not a fun story to re-tell (go Google the details if you must), but suffice to say even though he did his time behind bars, Hollywood seemed much more forgiving. Powder (1995) was a high profile success but brought attention to his crimes once again – on a Disney produced film, no less. Jeepers Creepers (2001) and its sequel in 2003 created one of the most interesting franchise monsters in a long time. And Salva seemed to have some momentum, only to step back into the shadows (too melodramatic?). But here he is again with Dark House , a direct-to-video, on-demand release about a troubled twenty-something whose search for his past leads to a broken-down estate in the middle of the woods. The only resident is a shaggy squatter (Tobin Bell of the Saw franchise) who warns him t...

Writer/director Larry Fessenden, the “buzzy” director behind indie horrors like Habit (1997) and Wendigo (2001) tries his hand at more traditional scares with Beneath (2013), a Chiller Network production about a giant fish stalking a boatful of annoying teenagers celebrating their last big high-school hurrah. This conventional set-up turns into an exercise in unconventional storytelling as Fessenden lets the teens kill themselves off. The monster simply cleans the tank. Make no mistake, Beneath isn’t that clever. But it definitely thinks it is. Deep down it’s just another dead teenager movie. Yet these teens turn on each other as the situation becomes more desperate, a switcheroo that challenges the actors and the viewers who probably just tuned in to watch Jaws in a rowboat. The movie itself isn’t always equal to the challenge, but it makes for more interesting viewing that most Mega Boa vs. Gatoroid fare. For genre fans, Fessenden’s choice to bring his monster fish to...

Not to get all “bloggy” on you, but Here Comes the Devil is a film that’s disappointing on a personal level. Everything from the poster to the synopsis to the critical praises on the front cover suggest it’s creepy little imported thriller about two kids who get on lost on a cursed mountain and return to their parents the next day somehow “changed.” You don’t have to be a whiz at Words with Friends to put this puzzle together and spell S-A-T-A-N. But from the opening prologue – a blurred lesbian sex scene whose inclusion is hard to justify – director Adrian Garcia Bogliano takes the wrong creative turn at almost every fork in the road, eventually driving us back to the very same cave where it all began. It’s a long, strange trip, all right…but the scenery is terrible and the radio is stuck on a death metal station. There’s a sexual subtext that is likely to blame for all the supernatural hokum going on. But it’s not handled well enough to come across as more than crude titillati...

At this point, it’s looking like it would be easier to actually put a man on Mars than to make a successful movie set there. The red planet has a seriously poor track record when it comes to appearing on film. John Carter was the most recent bust. But a pair of competing millennial projects ( Mission to Mars and Red Planet ) didn’t fare much better…and don’t even get me started on the John Carpenter-directed catastrophe Ghosts of Mars with a cast of rock ‘n roll zombies emerging from the dust bust a cap in Ice Cube’s ass! So by comparison, The Last Days on Mars (2013) can’t help but look good. It takes the hard science angle that actually worked well for Red Planet and combines it with the ubiquitous undead approach that, well, really doesn’t. The fact that the film winds up becoming simply “Zombies on Mars” is somewhat forgivable when you have a movie that tries so hard to be something more. Vincent (Liev Schreiber) is part of a Mars mission due to return home in exactly...

Sylvester Stallone may not have invented the sequel, but he damn near perfected it! First with the Rocky franchise and its five follow-ups, then Rambo and his most recent all-star retro action fest, The Expendables . Of course, we need not mention his many one-trick failures like Cobra and Tango & Cash , which were engineered for franchise success but never made it. Simply holding the 6-disc Rocky Heavyweight Collection in your hand is proof enough that the man knew how to tailor each installment – during each decade - to the right audience. The first Rocky (1976) was a triumph not just for the character, but Stallone himself. Too bad he never lets us forget it. The story about how he wrote the script in three days, refused to sell unless he got the starring role, then carried the movie on his shoulders all the way to the Oscar finish line has been dredged up every time he hits another career slump. Rocky has been in his corner since the beginning and, despite leaning on...

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) is a little bit of everything. Call it a heist movie, a road movie, a buddy movie, a comedy, drama, or action flick. It’s the perfect example of a film whose true meaning comes from whatever the viewer brings along to the experience. And yet it still falls comfortably within Clint Eastwood’s acting range as a semi-retired criminal on the run from his old partners who teams up with a young wise-ass (Jeff Bridges) for one more job. Creatively, it’s also an unlikely partnership between first-time director Michael Cimino, who would bankrupt an entire studio in part due to his perfectionism on Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Eastwood’s much more economical shooting style. The film feels loose and fun, much in the same vein of Clint’s later fluff like Every Which Way But Loose (1978), but with a hippie hangover that still resonates with highway poetry of both the visual and thematical sort. Sounds deep? Not to worry, Thunderbolt is entertainment first and ...

You don’t have to dig very deep into the subtext of most slasher movies to uncover a psychological case study of gender roles, sexual repression, and a comical amount of phallic symbols. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) contains no more or less than average, but sticks out from the rest by virtue of having been written by renowned feminist Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Jones, who made her debut with this piece of ‘80s exploitation for legendary producer Roger Corman. Having two women behind the camera for a film like this might seem revolutionary – and Corman certainly wasn’t shy about talking it up at the time – but creatively The Slumber Party Massacre is pretty much the same old bag ‘o tricks. Naked girls, horny guys, lots of drinking, drugs and underage sex mixed with the requisite serial killer wielding his weapon of choice: a 2-foot cordless drill. Made on the cheap like most of Corman’s productions, for all its creators’ intentions of skewering slasher conventions, ...

There aren’t many secrets left to uncover in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Few directors have had their works so meticulously scrutinized, studied and admired more than Hitch. So with their release of 1940’s Foreign Correspondent on a blu-ray / DVD dual format edition, it almost feels like the folks at Criterion have lightened things up a bit. Although the extras are rich and plentiful, they take a broader view of the director’s work leading up to WW2 with his emphasis on entertainment first…and propaganda second. Foreign Correspondent was Hitchcock’s second American film following Rebecca (1940) , both films competing against each other during the 1941 Academy Awards. While Rebecca is more memorable, it’s also atypical of Hitchcock’s style at the time; a humorless affair that treats its central tragedy with a deadly earnestness dictated by producer David O’ Selznick. By contrast, Hitchcock was given pretty much free reign on Foreign Correspondent …and it shows. An obvious ...

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” It’s a warning repeated time and time again in mad scientist movies just after some creature created on a slab is finally burned, be-headed or drowned in a swamp. But it applies to filmmakers themselves as well, particularly the team responsible for Zombie Night and Zombie Night 2: Awakening . While relatively inexpensive video and editing systems have made it easy for just about anyone to make a quote-unquote “movie,” technology can’t replace talent…either behind or in front of the camera. And both of these low-rent gore films were lacking in almost every area except ambition. But, giving credit where credit is due, the same group of filmmakers came up with a rather clever idea for their follow-up project, Reel Zombies . In this faux-documentary an actual zombie apocalypse goes down with all the typical death and destruction (all off-screen, of course). But producer Mike Masters (playing himself, as does the rest of the cast and c...

For filmmakers adapting a popular comic book character to the screen, one of the first questions they face must be “How faithful has this thing got to be?” Treat the original text as a bible and you deliver a dated, cornball superhero in tights. But go too far afield from the source material and you’ve suddenly have millions of fanboys planning a boycott. The Shadow (1994) went out on a limb and stuck with a ‘30s setting complete with tommy guns, glamorous dames and wise-guy dialogue. It was a risky move by screenwriter David Koepp ( Carlito’s Way, Jurassic Park ) considering Dick Tracy – which mined much of the same material – was only moderately successful four years earlier and got hammered by critics (although that might have been the “Madonna” factor). But director Russell Mulcahy’s ( Highlander ) film seem to revel in its cornball cinematic status, set against phony backdrops and questionable special effects that almost dare you to make fun of them. Alec Baldwin plays La...

Discounting the brief media attention brought on by the success of The Artist , it’s only a matter of time before classics of the silent era become irrelevant to all but the most studious of film historians. Luckily, that’s exactly whom Kino Classics caters to with their blu-ray release of 1920’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which includes not only the John Barrymore film, but a 15-minute segment of the rival version produced by Louis B. Mayer, and the complete one-reel version of the story filmed in 1912. All of them are a bit rough around the edges compared to later adaptations like the Spencer Tracey / Ingrid Bergman version from 1941, but Barrymore’s performance as both the uptight Jekyll and monstrous Hyde drew accolades at the time of its release. The impact of that performance has obviously lessened with the passing of time, with the actor’s “transformation” consisting of little more than jerks and spasms that bear an uncanny resemblance to Martin Short. That said, for its era D...

Michael Mann wasn’t the first or last director to be accused of delivering style over substance. But few filmmakers had the same sort of pop culture impact to throw back in the face of their critics. Of course, Miami Vice had the most widespread influence, but Mann was perfecting his craft with Thief three years earlier. Starring James Caan as an all-business-all-the-time professional safe cracker, this 1981 heist-drama was at the forefront of the new age of modern cops and robbers crime stories. Like most of the director’s early ‘80s output, Thief is populated with characters we already know: criminal kingpins, hired guns, dirty cops and noble felons. But Mann’s cinematic innovation was using this familiarity to sidestep the usual tired screenwriting scenarios, freeing him up to focus on the mood of each scene rather than the motivation. A product of the prison system, Frank (James Caan) is anxious to create a new life for himself using the skills he learned in prison from h...

It’s fairly well established that no Spaghetti western will ever top the work of Sergio Leone, particularly Once Upon a Time in the West , which best encapsulates the director’s operatic, cinematic-style. So fans have now accepted that the best they can do is argue “Who’s Number Two?” But even that debate poses problems, with nearly a dozen Italian shoot ‘em ups in the running. Grindhouse Releasing submits the latest candidate, The Big Gundown (1966), with a massive four-disc set, including two hi-def versions of the film, an expanded U.S cut on DVD and the rare soundtrack CD featuring the score by legendary Ennio Morricone. Marketed in the U.S. as the return of “Mr. Ugly,” The Big Gundown gives star Lee Van Cleef his most interesting role outside of the Leone collaborations. Here he plays a vigilante of sorts, John Corbett, tracking down dangerous outlaws simply to make Texas a safer place to live. His exploits have catapulted him to the steps of public office and attracted th...

Part of the horror remake craze of the early ‘80s, Paul Schrader’s take on Cat People never quite fit with the more conventional reboots like The Thing or more contemporary reimaginings like An American Werewolf in London . First of all, producer Val Lewton’s 1942 original was never all that conventional in the first place. As directed by noir specialist Jacques Tourneur, the film was only tangentially a horror film to begin with, dealing with repressed sexuality and psychological fears with a level of subtlety rare in genre films at the time. Schrader’s remake amps up the eroticism, adds some mild S & M and an entirely new mythological back-story. If not an outright improvement, it’s at the very least an interesting interpretation of the original story, but one that never knows quite how to maintain its status as a “horror film.” Irena (Nastassia Kinski) arrives in New Orleans to meet her brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell), reunited after growing up in separate orphanages. ...

For my money, 2010’s Insidious was the scariest movie of the 2000s. And surprisingly enough, it came from the creators of Saw , one of the most plodding and tortuous (no pun intended) horror film franchises ever. If anything, that proves writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan know how to stay ahead of a trend. And with horror moving in a more suggestive direction, the creative duo struck a nerve with little more than creaking doors, spooky voices and a whole lot of Poltergeist references. Insidious: Chapter 2 reunites the entire team behind and in front of the cameras, with Rose Byrne returning as the beleaguered wife of Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) who returned from the netherworld to retrieve their astral projecting son from a flame-faced demon. But unfortunately, it wasn’t actually Josh who came back. Possessed by the twisted spirit of a mass murderer, his body’s new occupant has the most evil intentions towards the rest of the family, which prompts matriarch Lorrain...

Throughout the 1960s, American International Pictures dug up a public domain goldmine adapting the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Beginning with The Fall of the House of Usher starring Vincent Price, the company cranked out one Poe tale after another, often basing their scripts on nothing but a title associated with the author’s name. Like Stephen King movies in the ‘80s, there was money to be had milking every scrap no matter how cinematically inadequate the material. H.P. Lovecraft just never commanded the same respect. A pulp writer who carried Poe’s gothic torch, but took it into much darker places, his work rarely made it to the screen in anything remotely approaching a faithful version. Likely because Lovecraft’s monsters tended to be on the “indescribable” side; interdimensional Elder Gods whose influence over mankind was far less adaptable to the screen than Poe’s low budget visions of the macabre. But AIP had some success with The Haunted Palace (1963), another Vincent Pric...

One of the most artistically satisfying aspects of the science-fiction genre is its ability to tackle contemporary issues effecting us in the “here and now” through a disguised crystal ball. Think Avatar and its blue-skinned eco-warriors. Or Planet of the Apes reverse take on racism. At its best sci-fi works on both levels: social criticism and plain ‘ol escapist entertainment. Director Neill Blomkamp did just that with District 9 , constructing a brilliant critique of the immigration problem in the form of thousands of alien refugees stranded in a man-made South African slum. The film’s financial success however, was more likely due to the Halo -like weaponry used in the violently exciting finale. Either way, it was clever enough to earn itself a Best Picture nomination; no small feat for a genre that rarely achieves that sort of critical recognition. So anticipation was high for Blomkamp’s sci-fi follow-up starring Matt Damon as an honorable worker-bee living on a pollute...

Even amongst the annals of Italian cult cinema, few movies are as deliriously out-there as Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City (1980). A Dawn of the Dead rip-off that paved the way for sprinting zombies, this is the sort of movie you recommend to someone who claims to have “seen it all.” Until this one is crossed off their list, they most definitely have not! The apocalypse begins with no preamble. A military plane carrying scientists scheduled to discuss a nuclear disaster lands unexpectedly. When the doors open, an army of irradiated madmen overwhelm the military police and proceed to tear their way through the city. Not zombies per se, these radiation-scarred freaks are covered with scabby wounds and drink the blood of their victims, passing along their nuclear disease exponentially. While the script sounds almost traditional now in terms of an apocalyptic horror set-up, Lenzi’s execution is anything but. His zombies (for lack of a better term) run, jump, stab, bite, and fire ...

It’s only within the last few decades that Ray Harryhausen’s work has come to be appreciated as something more than childish fantasy. Perhaps because an entire generation of filmmakers grew up watching his stop-motion masterpieces like Jason and the Argonauts and 7 th Voyage of Sinbad , much the way Harryhausen himself idolized the work of King Kong creator Willis O’Brien. Things have come full circle, only this time on a much grander scale. Yet in the 1970s, Harryhausen saw his work falling out of style. The realism achieved in films like 2001 and Star Wars were the death knell for the stop-motion process, which only had a handful of practitioners anyway; and which made The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) seem somewhat antiquated even when they hit theaters. But 40 years later, those same movies (or at least the effects used to create them) have a personality and vitality lacking in most modern special effects. Today’s blockbusters...

Brand loyalty is pretty tough to come by these days. Whether it’s face soap, breakfast cereal or hemorrhoid cream, customers are more apt to move along to the next great deal or discounted special if the price is right. It’s even more unusual when that company is a DVD distributor, whose traditional role is to release films that will reach as wide (and undiscriminating) an audience as possible. And yet, despite the onset of digital delivery and streaming media, companies like Criterion, Kino and Blue Underground have become like mini film festivals unto themselves, re-introducing neglected niche films on special editions with the sort of pomp and circumstance that major studios often don’t include on even their most prestigious catalog titles. And in 2013, no one has done that better than Shout Factory and its spin-off sub-label, Scream Factory. From the lesser-known work of John Carpenter ( Assault on Precinct 13, Prince of Darkness ) and Sam Raimi ( Crimewave ) to full-blown b...

Although Robert Downey Jr. is now the “face” of Marvel when it comes to motion pictures, the company owes a huge debt of gratitude to Hugh Jackman. The actor’s take on Wolverine was the first fully realized character to emerge unscathed in the comic to screen translation. He was edgy but accessible, aloof but endearing, the ladies loved him and the men wanted to be him. And perhaps most importantly, he (along with original X-Men director Bryan Singer) made the idea of a guy with unbreakable bones and 12-inch claws seem believable …a concept that is vital to Marvel’s current template for success. But after the cover-your-eyes atrocity that was 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine , it looked like everyone’s favorite anti-hero had made his final snikt ! That probably explains the blasé buzz around The Wolverine when it was first announced. No one wanted to see the character dragged through the mud, no matter how much heart (or how many abs) Jackman brought to the role. Yet the movie...

Director Mario Bava’s cinematic universe is full of gothic castles, dramatic lighting and masked killers. But 1963’s The Whip and the Body adds an edgy S & M twist that makes the Roger Corman / Vincent Price Poe films it was designed to compete with seem tame by comparison. Christopher Lee stars as Kurt Menliff, the prodigal son whose return to his ancestral home is greeted with outrage and contempt. Picking up where he left off, Kurt lures his brother’s wife, Nevenkah (Daliah Lavi), into a masochistic affair and threatens to reclaim the inheritance he forfeited so long ago. But his unexpected murder casts suspicion on every member of the household; a mystery made even more urgent when Nevenka claims that her tormentor has risen from the grave seeking revenge. One of Bava’s most difficult films to track down, it’s full of his signature Technicolor lighting scheme; reds, green and blues streaming down cobwebbed corridors and hiding in every corner of the screen. Shot between...

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...