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What Have You Done to Solange? may not be the giallo's finest hour - Bava and Argento serve as genre's bookends - but it certainly takes the category of sleazy Italian mysteries to a new level artful exploitation. Director Massimo Dallamano (who helped created the look of Sergio Leone's first two Dollars movies) takes all the tropes fans have come to expect - a black gloved killer, memory impaired witness and sexually charged murders - and whips them into a flashback frenzy of plot twists and character shifts. The opening scene finds Enrico Rosseni (Fabio Testi), the gym instructor at an all-girls Catholic school, sharing an intimate moment with one of his students, Elizabeth (Cristina Galbo), in a rowboat along the river Thames. But their lovemaking is interrupted when Elizabeth claims to have caught a glimpse of a brutal stabbing somewhere on shore. Loath to reveal what they saw to the police (underage sex and all, you know), the couple keeps quiet until even more...

Why the idea of a curated movie subscription service hasn't taken off yet is a bit of a mystery. I mean, Oprah managed to steer people's literary tastes for 15 years, but cinema somehow just can't duplicate the shared artistic experience. Netflix and other streaming services offer "recommendations" based on previous downloads, but that's trying to guess your preferences...not introducing you to something exotic, unusual or strange. When Arrow Video (already a popular cult label in Europe) launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund its expansion into the US market, it asked funders to pay up front for a relatively foggy release schedule of Blu-ray titles with no guarantee that they'd like what they were paying for. Much like the Criterion Collection, people were investing in the good judgment of Arrow's staff, counting on the fact that future restorations would be worthwhile viewing experiences...even if they might not have been a day-one purcha...

There are some people who will never watch a film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. The author's very name has become associated with a "chick flick" stigma that, while apropos in some respects, earns a quick dismissal from most of the male population almost immediately...except those who begrudgingly admit Alicia Silverstone was hot in Clueless . And Sense and Sensibility (1995) is unlikely to change their minds. Because Austen's world, no matter how cleverly actress/screenwriter Emma Thompson adjusts it to fit our own, requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. And while the male species seems just fine justifying the existence of aliens, zombies and 25-foot sharks, the Y chromosome seems to balk at the that idea women were once reliant on men for every social and financial necessity. Or, at least, they don't find the idea very entertaining onscreen. After the death of her husband leaves his entire estate to a child from another marriage,...

Thanks mostly to the critical prestige his films bring to the studios, Woody Allen has had the sort of creative freedom other directors only dream about. That and an impressive work ethic have helped him pump out a movie a year since the release of Annie Hall in 1977. With Shadows and Fog (1991), once again Allen digs deep into his box of cinematic inspirations, marrying a beautiful black-and-white tribute to German Expressionism with his typically self-absorbed cast of characters. It's an experiment in broad humor, romantic philosophy and political paranoia that never quite works, but certainly looks pretty while doing so. Allen takes over lead actor duties as Kleinman - yet another take on the actor / director's cowardly putz persona - who is coerced into hunting the foggy streets for a serial strangler. While he and his fellow citizens run in circles, various other characters unwittingly enter the fray. Irmy (Mia Farrow), on the run from a traveling circus and her ...

Released just one year after the Watergate scandal, Scorpio (1973) fits comfortably into the modern-day espionage mold, one in which secret agents are just as suspicious of their own organizations as they are of the enemy's. Burt Lancaster stars as agent Cross, a seasoned pro with contacts around the world, specializing in pulling off assassinations that create chaos in all the right places. His understudy is a sophisticated Frenchman, Jean "Scorpio" Laurier (Alain Delon), so named for his specialty: hunting down the hunters when the agency needs to clean house. And Cross has just made the list. Accused of being a double-agent, Cross leaves his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt) and goes on the run, using his accumulated smarts and sources to stay one step ahead of CIA director McLeod (John Colicos) and his army of ill-prepared government stooges. Eventually it comes down to whether the master has taught his pupil enough to track him down and finish the job. Directed by Mich...

It’s ridiculously ironic that, thanks to companies like Blue Underground, I’ve probably written more comprehensive reviews for the work of Jess Franco than John Ford, Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg combined. Of course, Franco has the edge in quantity , with some 200 films attributed to the director under various pseudonyms. But quality : that’s a word not often associated with any of his productions. So it’s surprising when you stumble upon titles like Justine (1968) and Eugenie (1969), a pair of psycho-sexual soft-core shenanigans based on the writings of the 17th century author / pornographer / sadist Marquis de Sade. Franco freely admits an affinity for the writer, whose name lends a naughty sort of legitimacy to the director’s usual exploitation oeuvre. But the most frustrating thing about Franco is he makes it difficult write his work off completely; there are always elements that hint at the soul of an artist lurking inside the filmography of a hack. Justine is the...

Loosely based on Shakespeare's patriarchal tragedy King Lear , 1954's Broken Lance stars Spencer Tracy as Matt Devereaux, a tyrannical rancher who defends his self-created kingdom with vicious authority from enemies both within and without. The three sons from his first wife (led by Richard Widmark as the eldest) bear the brunt of his constant disappointment and discipline. While the fourth, Joe (Robert Wagner), earns a more liberal hand; a situation which leads to a dangerous amount of brotherly resentment. After taking the law into his own hands by burning down a mining operation that was poisoning a nearby stream, Matt finds himself in a legal bind and is forced to turn over ownership in the ranch to his sons. But it's Joe who does the hard time to keep his father out of jail. And after his release, these complicated family ties get pulled into an even tighter knot. To be honest, there's little about Broken Lance (1954) that deserves special mention. As J...

At this point in home video collecting history it's pretty hard to surprise anyone. Especially horror fans, who often wind up buying the same newly remastered title year after year just to get that rush of rediscovery again. In these desperate times it's nice to run across something that's a true rarity, pleasantly demented and absolutely worth the hype. But that's exactly what Blood Rage is: a latter-day slasher shot in Jacksonville, FL that's just as gory, goofy and spectacularly fun as anything in the most well-rounded geek's closet collection. After witnessing his mother's make-out session at the local drive-in, young Terry goes on a violent rampage, chopping up another amorous couple a few doors down. But it's his twin, Todd, who takes the blame, which promptly sees the 8-year-old shipped off to a mental institution. Flash forward ten years: Todd finally escapes from his unnecessary incarceration and heads back to their family apart...

Assigned the task of making " Jaws on land," director Elliot Silverstein brought up to studio executives the many challenges of trying to top Spielberg with a story about a demonic vehicle wreaking havoc in broad daylight in the desert...not the least of which was the fact that Spielberg already made it ! Four years before pitting Roy Scheider against a great white, the director had put Dennis Weaver in a similar position against an unstoppable semi-truck in Duel (1971), a made-for-TV movie that was released theatrically overseas to great success. The Car (1977) doesn't have one-tenth of the tension that made Duel great, but it's still fun in the way most forgettable B-movies are: taking a ridiculous scenario so seriously that one can't help but have a good time watching James Brolin and his deputies go head-to-head against forces they don't understand. And quite honestly, neither does anyone else! The Car doesn't even attempt to explain th...

Twins are creepy. With all due respect to real-life identical siblings, there's just something unnatural about two people looking exactly alike. As the filmmakers behind Goodnight Mommy (2014) explain, "You just can't trust them." Writer/director team Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala use this audience predisposition to maximum effect in their film which creates an almost Kubrickian sense of dread around the story of a mother whose twin boys suspect she's been replaced by an imposter after returning wrapped in post-cosmetic surgical bandages. Elias and Lukas live in their own sheltered world of secrets and adventures. Mother's reappearance (actress Susanne Wuest's character goes unnamed otherwise through the film) seems to set them off on a dangerous game as they first question her behavior, then her very identity ...leading to a disturbing torture session that is extremely difficult to watch. Goodnight Mommy is unsettling both in terms of cont...

Anthology films, as rare as they are throughout cinematic history, seem to fit most comfortably within the horror genre. Like campfire stories, they don't demand a complex narrative or fully developed characters to generate a good scare or unexpected twist. Amicus put out several memorable anthologies in the early '70s like Tales from the Crypt , George Romero and Stephen King knocked it out of the park with Creepshow in 1982, and we've even seen a surprising resurgence of late with Trick 'r Treat (2007) and the VHS films. Nightmares (1983) actually began life as a TV spinoff of ABC's Darkroom , a latter-day Twilight Zone hosted by James Coburn. With the show's cancellation Universal decided to push several discarded stories into theatrical development. There's really no cohesive theme at work, just a collection of four chapters that still seem more at home on the small screen than the large one. Terror in Topanga restages a common urban l...

Strange Invaders (1983) supposes that aliens landed in the small town of Centerville, Illinois in 1958, replaced the entire population, and has been living in a sort of zoological experiment ever since. Its residents are the cinematic descendents of Jack Finney's Body Snatchers , covering up the conspiracy at all costs and sucking the life out of interlopers like fleshy shrinky-dinks. The parallels with alien invasion films of the '50s are purposefully obvious. But director Michael Laughlin's is more than homage; it's as bizarre and left-of-center as the disguised residents of Centerville themselves. When his ex-wife disappears after a trip back to her mysterious hometown, Charles Bigelow (Paul Le Mat) drives from his New York apartment to the heartland of America to get the scoop. He's scared off by a welcoming committee that includes several unfriendly locals (including b-movie veteran Kenneth Tobey) and a bug-eyed alien that shoots lightning from its elongat...

Before their runaway success with The Sopranos and Game of Thrones , HBO struggled for years to build an identity as the home on pay-cable TV for compelling original program. Their first breakout success was Tales from the Crypt , a horror anthology series with a who's who of Hollywood producers and directors (Richard Donner, Walter Hill, Joel Silver, David Giler and Robert Zemeckis) championing the "not-safe-for-broadcast-television" Grand Guignol storytelling. While there was a strong emphasis on humor over horror, the series, which ran for seven seasons, attracted a great deal of A-list talent and even inspired two feature-film spinoffs. The first, Demon Knight (1995), actually jettisons most of the tongue-in-cheek style of the show (except for those terrible Crypt Keeper intros) and focuses instead on action-horror thrills with an ensemble cast of characters fighting off the physical and psychological attacks of the Collector (Billy Zane), a disguised demon who...

There are no two sweeter words in the low-budget horror language than "public domain." Roger Corman made his career on the back of Edgar Allen Poe, crafting a feature length movie out of nearly every novel, short story, poem and turn of phrase the author put to paper. And thanks to U.S. copyright law that categorized any pre-1923 published work in the public domain, the producers didn't have to pay a dime for the idea. Of course, most of Poe's stories needed some updating but his work proved surprisingly malleable; so much so that filmmakers continued to use his macabre masterpieces for some free-of-charge inspiration. Arrows Films has put together an unexpected double-feature of Italian titles under the heading of Edgar Allen Poe's Black Cats , a handsomely packaged set that includes blu-ray / dvd combo special editions of Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat (1981) and Sergio Martino's Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key (1972) both of whi...

The rise and fall of the spaghetti western has been well documented, but for the lay-fan it comes down to this: there's the Dollars trilogy...and then there's everything else. Tony Anthony's "Stranger" films fit very comfortably in the everything else category, particularly Get Mean (1975), the fourth and final outing that sends his scruffy ne'er-do-well cowboy on a time-traveling adventure to Spain to return a stolen princess and claim a mythical treasure. Actually, just how the Stranger happens to meet up with these fuzzy barbarians and stuffed-shirt Spanish nobles isn't made clear. Get Mean glosses over the fine details and cuts straight to the battle scenes, anxious to get to its fish-out-of-water scenario with as little dialogue as possible. For those already familiar with Tony Anthony's "why so serious?" take on the reinvented Western, the film is a bizarrely satisfying finale to a series of films that got progressively m...

There's been a resurgence of minimalist ghost stories in cinemas of late. Saw and other related splatter franchises finally succumbed to subtler PG-13 frights that, while not always original, at least make you reach for the armrest rather than a barf bag. In a sense Kwaidan (1964) is the most minimal horror film ever made, consisting of four traditional Japanese ghost stories that, if presented in a straightforward linear fashion, would take up only around a half-hour of screen time. But director Masaki Kobayashi's film run three full hours, telling each tale at a pace that demands the utmost patience...but delivers the most visually sumptuous rewards. The first story, The Black Hair , foreshadows many '90s J-horror entries like The Ring featuring stringy-haired ghost girls looking for revenge. But, but based on folk tales, there's a bit more of a lesson involved as an arrogant swordsman leaves his loyal wife to look for good fortune elsewhere. Years later,...

Of all the major horror directors, David Cronenberg has the bleakest world-view, with the vast majority of his films ending as the main character lies dead, dying, absorbed or twitching in a puddle of bodily fluids. But 1979’s The Brood is in a league all its own, inspired by the director’s custody battle during an ugly divorce which he turned into his most personal body-horror nightmare to date. Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) is the originator of “psychoplasmics,” an experimental form of therapy that encourages patients to release their anger and anxiety through actual physical manifestations of their skin; rashes, hives and cancer are the result. But Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) is the star of the clinic, giving birth to actual dwarf-sized children who respond to her emotions with deadly results. Her husband, Frank, senses that something is wrong and cuts off his daughter’s visits, which only exacerbates Nola’s feelings of resentment and distress. And soon the brood is unconsci...

“They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” - Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) from Jurassic Park While re-mastering Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) for high-definition doesn’t have the same potential for catastrophe as cloning dinosaurs, the quote is still an apt headline for what surely must be the most unexpected Blu-ray ever . Funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, this cleaned up version of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 classic (sans robots) presents the best possible version of what many people consider the worst movie of all time. For those unfamiliar with the film, a plot description may make it sound like a relatively routine horror quickie. Rest assured, it’s not. Taking the wrong turn on their family vacation, Michael, Margaret and little Debbie wind up spending the night with Torgo, the creepy caretaker of a ramshackle home on the edge of the desert. Torgo insists that “The Master” – whose portr...

Horror-comedy it tough to pull off even when one has plenty of resources. Considering 1948’s Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein is a high-water mark for the genre, it’s been nearly 70 years since anyone has had unanimous success. And director Gary Jones’ Mosquito (1994) had an uphill battle from the beginning, with a low budget, local actors and overly ambitious screenplay. The results are, on one hand, exactly what you would expect: an amateurish attempt at recreating the “big bug” movies of the ‘50s. But the film’s imaginative effects and go-for-broke pacing wind up hooking you anyway. The mutant bloodsuckers grow to giant size after feasting on an alien that crash lands in a local swamp, which just so happens to be not so far away from a popular campground. Soon, campers are being drained of all their vital fluids, leaving one incompetent park ranger (Ron Asheton, guitarist for The Stooges) and a motley crew of scientists, civilians and bank robbers to clean up the mess...

Horror fans have long memories. And while millenials are inundated by digital monsters of every sort, there still remains a great deal of affection for the old-school artistry behind Hammer Studio’s pioneering versions of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy. It took a while to get going, but the Hammer catalog is now fairly well represented on standard DVD. What it lacked was an impressive hi-def Blu-ray treatment….until now! Warner Bros four-movie Horror Classics Volume One is long overdue. While Universal got great results from the hi-resolution remastering of its seminal monster flicks from the ‘30s and ‘40s, it seemed that Hammer’s distribution history (their films were released in the US through several different companies) would prevent any particular studio from investing too much time and energy. But here they are – The Mummy, Dracula has Risen from the Grave, Taste the Blood of Dracula and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed – in exactly the sort of pristine collection fa...

When he’s working at full steam, there’s no other director alive who imbues more passion into his films than Francis Ford Coppola. His greatest works always seem teeter on the edge of collapsing into madness, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula is no exception. A bravura showpiece of costume design, old-school optical effects and overblown romance, the film failed to revitalize Coppola’s career like it should have, instead winding up as a footnote to more cerebral works like Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. But from a purely visual perspective, this take on the Dracula mythos is by far the most successful ever filmed. Challenging himself on two different fronts, Coppola pledged to stay true to the original novel and utilize only traditional in-camera effects to create the film’s elaborate scares. He got it half right, coming up with ingenious and beautiful camera tricks through the use of miniatures, matte work and puppets. But the story itself, from a screenplay by James V. Hart, layers the ac...

Although the ‘80s are often dismissed as yielding a rather bland crop of Hollywood movies, what the decade lacked in style in more than made up for in storytelling. Nestled between the edgy indies and the overblown action flicks were a wide variety of quiet period dramas ( Driving Miss Daisy, Room with a View , Distant Voices, Still Lives) whose emotional stakes ran just as high as the competition…but were produced on a much smaller cinematic scale. 82 year-old director Yoji Yamada, responsible for more than 82 movies over the course of his career, brings that rare sort of personal yet accessible filmmaking full circle with The Little House (2014), telling the story of a young housemaid, Taki Nunomiya, better known as “Taki Dear” to the Hirai family with whom she’s employed in 1930’s Tokyo. The woman of the house, Tokiko Hirai, is a stylish young wife and mother thankful for the companionship that her work-obsessed husband isn’t willing to provide. Outside of their red-tiled mode...

Finding a good spaghetti western has become as difficult as finding good Italian food. There are so many options out there you have spend as much time researching your choices as you do enjoying them…or risk settling for Olive Garden . That’s when it pays to get a good recommendation. And Arrow Films has already presented us with a couple of choice titles (including Day of Anger and Cemetery Without Crosses ) that had little name recognition outside of fan circles. Their latest, Requiescant (1967) is, thankfully, more of the same. A revenge story with overt spiritual and political overtones, the movie begins with the massacre of an entire pueblo of Mexicans who’d parlayed for a truce with ruthless Texas aristocrat George Ferguson (Mark Damon). The lone survivor is a young boy with no memory of the event. But 20 years later, fate find the now young man (nameless but for the Requiescant nickname) butting heads with Ferguson again after his adopted sister becomes a prisoner pro...

The 1970s were a huge decade for horror on the big screen, spawning iconic masterpieces like The Exorcist along with killer franchises ( Halloween, Texas Chainsaw ) that still linger on. But it was a big decade on the small screen as well, most notably thanks to the work of producer Dan Curtis whose vampire soap opera Dark Shadows led to a number of movie-of-the-week chillers and spooky TV series spin-offs. Burnt Offerings (1976) is not one of them. The film was Curtis’ sole anomalous theatrical release amongst a string of made-for-television productions, although shot in a flat, foggy episodic TV-style. And it attracted one heck of a cast, including Oliver Reed, Karen Black and the legendary Bette Davis, playing house in a ramshackle mansion that harbors a secret passed down from one generation to the next. Ben and Marian Rolf (Reed and Black) get a suspiciously good deal on their summer rental, which turns out to be a large estate complete with swimming pool and greenhouse...

From the pulpy movie poster to its tough-guy leading man, The Satan Bug (1965) feels less like an apocalyptic disaster movie and more like an ambitious mystery novel. Director John Sturges followed up his epic WWII adventure The Great Es c a pe with this much more compact story of a secret germ warfare lab robbed of one of its most potent concoctions. Hot on the trail of the titular airborne virus, which could wipe out all life on Earth within a few weeks, is investigator Lee Barrett (George Maharis) who suspects the heist was an inside job. But time is running short as staged “events” leave hundreds of dead bodies behind as proof of the terrorists’ very real threat. With the entire city of Los Angeles targeted next, Barrett must track down each vial before time runs out on us all. Even though the script calls for a global catastrophe and more than a few suspenseful action sequences, most of The Satan Bug is confined to laboratories, offices and meeting rooms. The impressive b...

For cult movie fans, Mark Harley’s 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, was like a can’t-miss playlist of new favorites they didn’t even know existed. Ripping through the history of the Australian exploitation genre of the ‘70s and ‘80s with excitement and affection, the only bummer was most of the films featured were still unavailable on home video. But each year more Ozploitation finds its way on Blu-ray and DVD, the latest being the infamous Turkey Shoot (1982), a hot mess of a sci-fi prison movie that features inmates being hunted for the sport of the corrupt political elite. Nonsensical and comically violent, director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s ( Dead End Drive-In ) film was stripped of a large portion of its budget and fifteen pages of script only two weeks before filming was to begin. What remains is an anything-goes montage of beatings, explosions, dismemberments and toe-eating monsters. It’s not the sort of film one defends as high art. But its commitment to delivering t...

1994 was the year of Pulp Fiction . Oh sure, audiences also showed up in droves for Forrest Gump, The Lion King and a live-action version of The Flintstones . But within the burgeoning world on independent cinema, there was a new king of the mountain. Which was really piss poor timing for John Dahl’s The Last Seduction , a sexy, neo-noir thriller that got good reviews but was steamrolled by the Tarantino juggernaut. Dahl certainly wasn’t reinventing cinema. In fact his next project, Unforgettable (1996), seemed to embrace the wham-bam, B-movie aesthetic studios used to crank out in the ‘50s starring second-tier actors caught up in lurid paperback-inspired plots. Only this time, the gimmick involves a bit of far-fetched pharmacological invention that transfers the memories of a suspected killer into the mind of the man framed for the same murder. David Krane (Ray Liotta) is a whip-smart assistant medical examiner assigned to a multiple homicide convenience store shoot-out. At ...

Summer Lovers (1982) isn’t deserving of any serious film criticism or retrospectives. But that doesn’t mean this breezy, carefree (and mostly clothes -free) ode to early ‘80s sexual adventurousness isn’t worth watching, especially from a 30-plus year perspective. Writer / director Randal Kleiser ( Grease ) points his camera at the Greek Isles, their white-washed villas and black-sand beaches invaded by 24-hour party people in full Dionysian frenzy, with vistas worthy of a National Geographic documentary. But the landscapes are only a backdrop for his careful – and rarely corny – exploration of a ménage a trois between a timid American couple and their more worldly local lover. Michael (Peter Gallagher) and Cathy (Daryl Hannah) arrive in Greece hoping to rekindle the spark in their relationship. Unfortunately, Michael makes sparks with Lina (Valerie Quennessen), a French archeologist who exudes a sexual freedom that Cathy sorely lacks. After Michael owns up to the affair, Cathy c...

Film is not only the most effective art form at chronicling social change; it’s also the most adept at inspiring it. And there’s little doubt that that was the agenda behind Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? , which confronted the conflicting generational attitudes regarding interracial relationships in a way that the stodgy news media and well-meaning protests could not. With cinematic royalty like Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn involved, this was a shot fired over the bow of most American’s view of race relations, yet presented in such a way that its liberal politics meshed perfectly with classic Hollywood dinner party comedy. After a ten-day courtship, freewheeling Joey (Katharine Houghton) brings back Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier) to meet her a parents, Matt and Christina Drayton (Tracy and Hepburn), and announce their impending nuptials only a short week away. Despite the Drayton’s liberal leanings, the situation comes as a shock, especially when ...