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In many ways, Nighthawks (1981) is the perfect transitional film from the more character-driven cop thrillers of the '70s to the shoot-first-ask-questions-later ideology of the '80s. In fact, the stated theme of the film - "Violence can only be fought with greater violence" - was embraced by an entire decade of filmmakers and action icons who molded the action movie into its current energetically excessive incarnation. And at the heart of it all is Sylvester Stallone who took over the troubled shoot after clashing with the original director and created a movie in his own image. Originally meant to focus on real-life international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, studio execs, fearful of theater bombings in reprisal, shifted the script to focus on a fictional Aryan substitute: Wulfgar Reinhardt (Rutger Hauer), so ruthless even his own organization has disowned him. Chased out of London, Wulfgar plans on making a big bang in New York where press coverage of his exploi...

James Cameron's The Abyss might be only a footnote in the director's career, wedged between installments of the Terminator and his record-breaking run with Titanic , but the short-lived buzz around its production inspired several other "underwater monster" flicks that rushed to beat it to the screen. And the crazy thing is, they did ! Thanks to the Abyss' 140-day shooting schedule and legendary production delays, movies like Leviathan and Deepstar Six were first into cinemas. And although they don't share much in common with Cameron's first-contact thriller, these quickie creature features have earned their fare share of fans since 1989. One year late to the party was The Rift (aka Endless Descent ), which was released straight-to-video in 1990, starring Jack Scalia as the designer of a sunken supersub who joins a rescue mission on its sister ship to retrieve the black box and find out what happened to the crew. But the rescue team soon find...

Low-budget horror hit a peak in the 70’s with films like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, breaking the barriers of good taste and the heretofore-predictable rules of scary movies audiences came to expect. These were the pioneers of the “anti-Hollywood” horror movie. While Hooper peaked with brief mainstream success as a director-for-hire on Spielberg's Poltergeist, Craven took the long road eventually getting his due with the Elm Street and Scream franchises. But he could never recapture the exploitation zeitgeist of his early work, especially The Hills Have Eyes, which tapped into an ugly mirror image of the American family that the director carried with him the rest of his career. The Carter family takes an ill-advised shortcut through an atomic test zone and winds up stranded in the middle of the desert. Their presence attracts the attention of a different sort of family altogether, inbred mutants who survive on human flesh and a...

There are robots and there are ro butts . That difference in pronunciation is quite profound within in the sci-fi genre; it's the difference between the childish escapism of Lost in Space and the complex social commentary of Star Trek , between the clunky metallic servants of Forbidden Planet and the rebellious cyborg slaves of Blade Runner . Simply put, ro- butts is a signifier of that innocent '50s take on the future when all humanity had to look forward to were matching jumpsuits and technology about as advanced as a Ford Pinto. So when it comes to The Shape of Things to Come , a sci-fi stinker from 1979, trust me when I say you can smell the butt coming a mile away! Ostensibly based on H.G. Well's novel of the same name, already adapted in eye-catching fashion once before in 1936 by William Cameron Menzies ( Invaders from Mars ), this version drifts out of the original material's orbit pretty quickly, aiming for a Star Wars escapist approach involving a ...

Blood Simple is easy to write-off as a calling card film. In fact, that's exactly what critic J. Hoberman of the Village Voice said in 1984, praising the film's style while dismissing it as a whole for being nothing more than a cinematic resume. He's right, of course, in recognizing the Coen brothers' ambition to kick-start their careers, raising money from private investors (a model their friend Sam Raimi used to finance The Evil Dead ) and shooting their low-budget noir thriller on the cheap in hopes of attracting some Hollywood attention. But dismissing the result of their efforts was a miscalculation as Blood Simple established a template that took the Coens all the way to the top of their profession. If that's just a resume, it's one hell of a good one! Ray and Abby (John Getz & Frances McDormand) are having an affair. To complicate the situation, Abby's husband, Marty (Dan Hedaya), is Ray's boss at a neon-soaked Texas honky-tonk. A...

With Arrow Video's release of Dead End Drive-In , we finally have director Brian Trenchard-Smith's most polished, professional film project on home video...only it's not actually Dead End Drive-In. Instead, it's a documentary short produced in 1978 as part of a public service campaign entitled Hospital's Don't Burn Down included as a bonus feature on Arrow's Blu-ray / DVD combo. No disrespect to the main feature, which Quentin Tarantino has anointed his favorite of the director's work, but in this case it's the extras which really make this collector's edition a must-buy. Set in a dystopian near future, Dead End Drive-In (1986) plays out in a Mad Max -style landscape where crime and unemployment have led to the imprisonment of youthful "undesirables" inside makeshift concentration camps created within a chain of drive-ins across the country. Crabs (Ned Manning) and Carmen (Natalie McCurry) are lured in and locked up with ...

Art imitates life in gruesomely entertaining fashion in 1973's Theater of Blood , starring Vincent Price as failed Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart, whose overblown performances are dismissed as the work of a professional "ham sandwich" by London's theater critics. But after his apparent suicide, Lionheart returns to claim his pound of flesh from each and every member of the critics circle, exacting his revenge in elaborate fashion by restaging the murders from the Bard's most famous plays. On the surface, director Douglas Hickox's film isn't so different from Price's other early '70s franchise, The Abominable Dr. Phibes . But the self-reflexivity of having him play a performer whose career is disparaged as one big melodramatic sham hits awful close to the bone. After all, as beloved as the as actor was to fans of the horror genre, his theatrical style was quickly falling out of fashion (as evidenced by director Michael Reeves' ...

The phrase "You had to be there" applies quite well to the '80s 3D boom, which produced such a startlingly bad crop of movies it's surprising Hollywood ever tried the gimmick again. Several struggling franchises were on their third installments, which meant that Amityville, Friday the 13th and Jaws all got the 3D treatment (and 3D in the titles), leaving room for some lesser-known independents to take advantage of the enhanced theatrical presentation. Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn was actually producer/director Charles Band's second 3D film, following Parasite , which provided an early leading role of Demi Moore. Bought up by Universal to fill the gap in their 3D library, the film is a bald-faced Road Warrior rip-off, complete with a leather clad hero cruising the wasteland in his custom ride searching for a renegade warlord...who just happens to be played by Road Warrior veteran Michael Preston. In Metalstorm 's defense, Mad Max ...

If Brian De Palma had worked during the era of internet bloggers instead of professional film critics, his career might have been altogether different. While a few journalists back in the day rallied in defense of the director's grandiose visual style (most notably Pauline Kael), the majority dismissed his work as "Hitchcock-lite;" entertaining enough for the masses but still just a pale imitation of films like Psycho and Vertigo , two of De Palma's biggest creative touchstones. But in the blogosphere, where nostalgia and top-ten lists take priority, De Palma is a full-fledged hero. Take for example Raising Cain , just released on Blu-ray by genre specialists Scream Factory, which features a director's cut in which the director had no actual involvement. Instead, this alternate version was created by a film student - Peet Gelderblom of the Netherlands - whose leaked internet essay caused such a stir that De Palma gave it his blessing. Rearranging scenes to m...

In the annals of horror sequel history, 1972's Beware ! The Blob (or Son of Blob as it was originally titled) had a reputation as one of the goofiest afterthoughts ever. Directed by Larry Hagman ( I Dream of Jeannie, Dallas ) with an eclectic cast of Malibu neighbors and friends, the film is a largely improvised series of sketch comedy situations pitting the hippie generation up against aging authority figures while a surviving piece of the Blob feeds on them both indiscriminately. As a follow-up to the Steve McQueen original, it's an amateurish mess. As a piece of post- Easy Rider trash cinema, it's a treasure. Thawed out by a worker who brings a sample home from the Alaskan pipeline, the Blob begins its all-you-can-eat buffet by snacking on houseflies and kittens before working its way up to human-size portions. Artists Lisa and Bobby (Gwynne Gilford and Robert Walker, Jr.) barely escape being gobbled up themselves and spend the rest of the movie trying to conv...

Stand-up comedian Jackie Cooper may have performed in thousands of nightclubs across the country and appeared on dozens of late-night talk shows, including regular gigs on Ed Sullivan and The Tonight Show , but if today's generation knows him at all it's as the voice of Frosty the Snowman in a series of Rankin Bass holiday specials. His signature soft-spoken delivery and self-deprecating style were a perfect fit for the lovable cartoon character. That's why it's almost sacrilegious to hear him spout lines like, "I'm so hungry, I could eat a whore!" in 1983's Microwave Massacre , a spoofy cannibal comedy built around Cooper's corny sense of humor and copious T & A horror clichés. Shot in the late '70s but released five years later, the script was originally written with Rodney Dangerfield in mind, which probably would have provided a bit more bite (sorry, I'm just preparing you). But as it stands, Microwave Massacre is an ...

Although it was produced at the height of Italy's giallo boom, 1971's The Bloodstained Butterfly is remarkable not so much for its similarities to popular titles of the time as for its differences . With a focus on forensic science and courtroom drama, the film leans closer to Hitchcock's The Wrong Man than anything in Dario Argento's oeuvre. And, even though it all leads up to a remarkable twist, there's a surprising lack of sex and violence: two of the prime ingredients in the most memorable gialli . But it's director Duccio Tessari's tendency to take the road less traveled that actually makes Butterfly a stand-out in a genre filled with films that were only too happy to follow in one another's footsteps. Opening with a confusing series of title cards introducing the main characters, the film segues into its opening murder: the brutal stabbing of a student whose body rolls into a crowded park. Witnesses identify a local sports reporte...

Women-in-Prison movies occupy a particularly seedy corner of the exploitation universe, seemingly serving no other purpose than to titillate, torture and shock. From perverse Nazi prison camps to sweaty Filipino cages, the settings may change but the ingredients are largely the same: rape, beatings, showers and lesbian sex. Even for cult film aficionados, WIP movies are a hard genre to justify let alone openly enjoy. But the Female Prisoner Scorpion series is one of the genre's rare stabs at respectability. Based on a popular manga, the first film - Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion - introduces Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji) who winds up behind bars after being seduced and double-crossed by her lover, a dirty cop with Yakuza ties. Vowing revenge, Nami suffers through the worst punishments the sadistic guards can dish out while her reputation and fame make her a target for other prisoners. She avoids one attack in the shower (blinding the warden in one eye in the process), sc...

It's become a cliche for filmmakers to describe a movie's setting as a character unto itself. But in the case of The Panic in Needle Park (1971), which uses New York City as its urban jungle background, that's most definitely not a case of artistic hyperbole. As shot by cinematographer Adam Holender (who'd had lots of practice on Midnight Cowboy ), Manhattan becomes a physical reflection of lead characters Bobby and Helen, two junkies who fall in love and fall through the cracks of the era's middle-class society. Needle Park is actually Sherman Square, a rough area on the upper west side populated by addicts and hookers living day to day in the decaying hotels and coffee shops. Bobby (Al Pacino) is an ambitious heroin supplier who's also hooked on his own merchandise. Helen is a fish-out-of-water from Fort Wayne, Indiana, sliding deeper into trouble after being talked into an abortion by her artist boyfriend (Raul Julia). She and Bobby have an immed...

DVD/ Blu-ray extras have evolved from a couple of trailers and radio spots to full-fledged documentaries that almost warrant a theatrical release in their own right. In fact, with collectors demanding more and more special features on nearly every title, including those that have been re-issued several times in the past, it seems like extras now carry more weight than the feature film itself. That being the case, it seems like the perfect time for Synapse to release Just Desserts: The Making of Creepshow , which actually did appear on a pair of UK special edition releases, but was left off of Warner's domestic release of Creepshow , the 1982 George Romero / Stephen King collaboration. It goes without saying that if one has no interest in Creepshow itself, then Just Desserts is nothing more than self-congratulatory fluff. But, really, who doesn't love Creepshow ?! A near-perfect recreation of the E.C. Comics horror brand, consisting of five stories and an animated wra...

Kathleen Turner's slow disappearance from the big screen after burning it up with Body Heat and Romancing the Stone is almost inexplicable. Like most actresses she was unfairly judged by her looks, her weight and her fading sex appeal, but it seemed like it all ended far too soon. Or maybe she just never aspired to be an empty Hollywood starlet, forever in the shadow of her Lauren Bacall-esque image. To judge by her role in Crimes of Passion , Ken Russell's 1984 twisted relationship drama, in which her character rapes a police officer with his own nightstick, it's safe to say Turner had her own career path in mind. Joanna Crane (Turner) is a designer by day and a dirty whore by night. Working under the alias China Blue, complete with platinum wig, crotchless panties and a purse full of sex toys, Joanna keeps a room at a sleazy motel and lords over her loyal clientele. But her secret identity is revealed by a part-time private investigator, Bobby (John Laughlin),...

Since the 1980s, loglines have been all the rage in Hollywood. Essentially a one-sentence hook used by screenwriters to pitch their ideas, it works best when comparing one movie to another; such as the ubiquitous Die Hard on a Bus scenarios that produced a slew of action rip-offs like Speed . But it's also an effective selling point for a film that hangs on a premise so preposterous that anything longer than one-sentence risks ruining the fun. So try this on for size: A man checks into a hotel for unmatched singles with only 45 days to find a romantic partner, at which point if he is still unattached, he will be turned into a lobster. There's your logline for The Lobster (2015), an amusingly outré comedy starring Colin Farrell as David, a sad-sack divorcee mingling with an equally quirky group of romantically-challenged candidates who hope to find an approved companion before they're changed into the animal of their choice. Director Yorgos Lanthimos, a Greek di...

The neo-noir cycle of the '90s produced a surprisingly robust collection of films ranging from dead-serious throwbacks ( After Dark, My Sweet , The Grifters ) to gonzo cross-genre experiments ( Mulholland Drive, Dark City ). 1993's Romeo Is Bleeding falls somewhere in the middle, which perhaps explains why this traditional - yet intermittently outré - story of a bad cop sinking even further into the shadowy criminal landscape was buried in a hastily dug cinematic grave. In fact, director Peter Medak's film plays like a Film Noir's Greatest Hits compilation, making sure all the staples are represented (world-weary narration, rain-soaked city streets) and adding some new tracks that amplify things to Tarantino levels of excess. Sgt. Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman) has been providing information for underworld types for years, banking 64K each time and "depositing" it in a hole in his backyard, a windfall his wife (Annabella Sciorra) knows nothing about. But...

Ornella Muti may not have the international fame of a Bond girl, but to a generation of pubescent film geeks her role in 1980's Flash Gordon as the seductive and duplicitous Princess Aura, daughter of Ming the Merciless, is just as iconic as Ursula Andress' bikini entrance in Dr. No . Muti didn't even have to show any skin, she simply slinked her way across the screen with as much sensuality as the PG rating allowed. In a film full of comic book camp and general ridiculousness, she was the most captivatingly "real" thing on the screen. Why am I lavishing so much attention on one actress' supporting role in a corny sci-fi adaptation? Because that will be the easiest port of entry for most people to appreciate Appassionata , a 1974 Italian drama focusing on a broken family unit that threatens to implode when its patriarch has an affair with one of his daughter's school-age friends. Emilio (Gabriele Ferzetti) splits his time between his dental prac...

In many ways, Suture (1993) is a proto-typical Sundance film: a cerebral deconstruction of classic Hollywood noir, too artsy for its own good but too interesting to write off completely. It's a work made by filmmakers who are still learning their craft, either too stubborn or too naive to make the small tweaks that would turn an offbeat "indie" into a more bankable thriller. For a film festival crowd, that's something to crow about. For a general audience, it's nothing but aggravation. Vincent Towers (Michael Harris) is a cold, cruel millionaire's son suspected of killing his father. Clay Arlington (Dennis Haysbert) is the brother he didn't know he had. When Vincent discovers their incredible resemblance, he fakes his own death to escape the murder charge, leaving Clay in the driver's seat when he detonates a remote-control bomb. Alive but disfigured, Clay's surgeons use old pictures and video to reconstruct his face - which is actual...

A holdover from the "porno-chic" trend that began and ended with 1972's Deep Throat , writer/director John Byrum's Inserts (1975) failed to connect with audiences at the time, even though it also rode the wave of Depression-era seventies cinema and starred Richard Dreyfuss hot off the success of Jaws and American Graffiti . Its shock tactics may be a bit on the nose, but the story of a failed director producing stag films to make living winds up eliciting some incredibly courageous performances, particularly from the female cast. Dreyfuss plays the "Boy Wonder," a drunken has-been whose career tanked after the studios' transition to "talkies." His muse is a former starlet (Veronica Cartwright) reduced to screwing on film in exchange for a few hits of heroine from their producer, Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), who drops in one day with Cathy (Jessica Harper), an ingénue who turns out to be anything but. When his actress suffers an accidental ov...

Released the same year Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were paired up in The Mummy , Hammer Films' The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) proved the company could do more than just reboot creaky Universal properties and shock audiences with day-glo gore. In fact, up until the recent BBC productions featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, Cushing's portrayal was considered by many to be the definitive representation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's quirky detective, the one-and-only Sherlock Holmes. And Doyle's quasi-supernatural story fits exceedingly well within Hammer's monster movie pantheon. Kicking off with a typically horrific prologue (one that bears close resemblance to The Curse of the Werewolf filmed two years later), the infamous Sir Hugo Baskerville is attacked and killed by a mysterious unseen beast, passing on a family curse that ensures future generations will meet the same fate. Enter the only surviving heir, Sir Henry Baskerville (Christopher Lee), who h...

If you're looking for one unintended positive side-effect of the proliferation of internet porn, at least we can hang our collective hats on this: all those drive-in T&A double-features of the '70s look almost puritanical by comparison. Roger Corman's Student Nurses launched a whole wave of now-innocuous skin flicks, most of them becoming progressively more single-mindedly titillating, drifting further and further afield from the original's overly earnest soap-opera antics. But leave it to director Jack Hill, whose career is hopelessly intertwined with Corman's, to follow in his mentor's footsteps, turning his own Nurses knock-off into a stealthy critique on female empowerment. That's certainly not what you'd expect with a title like The Swinging Cheerleaders . Rest assured, most of the female cast goes topless at one point or another. But it's rarely staged in a callous or exploitative fashion, hewing much closer to the format...

Now that we've reached the point of zombie oversaturation, it's fun to look back at the undead's humble beginnings. Long before Romero's "ghouls" were re-animated in 1969 ostensibly due to a crashed satellite, Invisible Invaders (1959) combined sci-fi and shambling corpses in amusingly cut-rate fashion in a story of transparent moon men who inhabit the bodies of the recently deceased to stage a takeover of the planet Earth. Apparently mankind's recent nuclear shenanigans are a clear and present danger to the invaders, who send in horror icon John Carradine, whose character, a famous nuclear scientist, is blown up in the opening credits but returns from the dead to act as the aliens' ombudsman. B-movie stalwart John Agar stars as a military man escorting a team of scientists to their underground bunker in an attempt to come up with a counterattack while the zombified masses burn down cities and cause general mass destruction. It's an inter...

The evolution of the western is the stuff scholarly studies are made of, but somehow The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) rarely earns a mention. Despite being nominated for Best Picture and starring the legendary Henry Fonda, director William A. Wellman's film just seems to slip between the cracks of cinema history even though it's unrelentingly dark subject matter was a crucial turning point for the genre. In a classic case of bad timing, ranchers Gil (Fonda) and Art (Harry Morgan) arrive in a quiet Nevada town just as all hell is about to break loose. Word reaches the saloon about the murder of another local rancher at the hands of outlaw rustlers and soon a lynching party is formed to make sure the wheels of justice turn quickly. Gil and Art begrudgingly join the posse, which soon comes up three men who not only fit the description but also are carrying the dead man's gun. And yet the idea of hanging men without a fair trial, despite the overwhelming evidence, doesn...

Has internet porn brought us to such a cultural and sociological low point that we're now nostalgic for the days of Cinemax late-night skin flicks? Apparently so. How else do you explain the release of Sorceress , a butt-smacking, toe-sucking template for exactly the sort of pay-tv shenanigans that kept dads up until all hours with one nervous finger on the remote control? This isn't vintage erotica or edgy art-house fare. It's just boobs of ridiculous sizes. Those in the know will point out the players involved (director Jim Wynorski along with stars Linda Blair and Julie Strain) have a rabid fan base and cinematographer Gary Graver earned some recent notoriety attempting to piece together Orson Welles unreleased final film, The Other Side of the Wind (although he paid the bills shooting titles like Countess Dracula's Orgy of Blood ). Still, there's no point in attempting to pass the film off as anything more than a sexy soft-core play on 1962's clas...

The information age has wreaked havoc on the traditional horror movie. Unexplored corners of the world always had the potential for cultural bogeymen that were just waiting to prey on unsuspecting white folks ( White Zombie, I Walked With A Zombie and Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow being the most voodoo-centric). But now that even the most isolated cannibal tribes probably post their meals on Facebook, it's hard to pull off the fish-out-of-water scenario convincingly. But The Other Side of the Door gives it the 'ol college try, working with a family of transplanted Americans living in India trying to deal with the death of their son, Oliver. Maria (Sarah Wayne Callies of The Walking Dead ) blames herself choosing to pull her daughter from the sinking vehicle (the crash itself is never explained) and leaving her son to drown. And when her depression turns suicidal, the family's Indian housekeeper tells her of a forbidden temple that will allow her to ...

Say what you will about producer Harry Alan Towers (various reports claim him to be a high-class pimp, a Soviet spy or both! ), the man knew how to sell a movie in the international marketplace: exotic locales, a little skin, sketchy literary pedigree and a few over-the-hill stars to pad the credits. With formula in hand he churned out a huge amount of second-tier adventure stories throughout the '60s with enough cross-cultural appeal that they could play almost anywhere...and still play quite well on home video, as a matter of fact. Circus of Fear is based on a mystery by Edgar Wallace, the British crime novelist whose name almost became a genre unto itself, particularly in Germany; eventually influencing the burgeoning giallo boom in Italy. The disparate plot threads (an armored car robbery, various love triangles and oaths of family vengeance) come together at the winter quarters of a traveling circus, where a murderer hides among the quirky employees. Is it the blackmaili...

Arrow Video's first Nikkatsu Diamond Guys set (review found here) was just the sort of curated film experience home video seems to be headed towards: a selection of categorically-grouped titles highlighting the Nikkatsu studio's top tier of male stars working in some fast, fun genre fare. And the second set follows an even more unexpected path of youth comedies, ensemble farce and flat-out spoofs that are a welcome treat right out of left field. Tokyo Mighty Guy (1960) leans heavily on the burgeoning generation gap to get most of its laughs. The lithely handsome Akira Kobayashi stars as Jiro, a French-speaking wannabe chef whose family restaurant is nearly destroyed when a famous ex-prime minister crashes his car into the front entrance. This sets off a chain of loosely connected problems including threats from the local "protection" squad who demand payment, a case of mistaken identity at the massage parlor and a shotgun wedding that ends in true love. Dang...