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Providing a shaky bridge between modern horror classics like Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist , Willard (1971) was a surprise hit in 1971, dropping the traditional supernatural scares and kickstarting the "animal attack" genre that would run rampant throughout the decade. But it's the film's soft-sell approach that helped it go mainstream, substituting honest-to-gosh emotions in place of grindhouse-style gore. Willard (played to perfection by a young Bruce Davison) is a bit of a pushover, allowing his boss, Mr. Martin (Ernest Borgnine) to work him all hours and his mother (Elsa Lanchester) to smother him with nagging affection. After running across a nest of rats in the backyard, Willard develops a close relationship with the cuddly rodents, particularly a black and white pair he names Ben and Socrates respectively. His new friends are quick learners and big eaters. With tax payments looming and his job on the line, Willard soon realizes that his rat...

It's safe to say that pandering to '80s nostalgia has gone mainstream. Everything from TV shows ( The Goldbergs ) to streaming events ( Stranger Things ) to pizza commercials (Ferris Buehler lived in Chicago, people, he would never order from Dominos!) is coated with day-glo residue of pop culture references and one-hit wonders. Released in 2001, well before the retro resurgence was even due to arrive, Donnie Darko uses the '80s as a colorful backdrop for its story of a troubled teen on the edge of full-blown paranoid schizophrenia...who also holds the fate of the world in his hands. Or not. The beauty of director Richard Kelly's film is that it doesn't hand out easy answers for its interconnected theories of time travel, spiritual plans, invisible friends and intangible jellyfish sprouting out of everyone's chest. It's a sort of sci-fi-afterschool-special that manages to treat mental illness with some real emotional weight and also get a laug...

Bracketed between a career full of beautiful, but often erotically offensive films, Walerian Borowczyk returned to his native Poland in 1975 to film The Story of Sin , a faithful and relatively demure adaptation of the novel by Stefan Zeromski, which details the romantic, moral and spiritual struggles of Ewa Pobratynska, a virginal innocent whose obsession with a married lodger that moves into the family home leads her astray from the church, her family and her own dignity. Yes, this is the same director responsible for The Beast (1975), one of the most ridiculously sexually explicit fairy tales ever filmed, and who continued pursued his obsession with genitalia into the horror genre with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981). Borowczyk apologists seem to be able to look beyond his rather grotesque fascinations, admiring the craft that lies underneath. And The Story of Sin is one of the few feature films that support their argument. Ewa believes she's found...

The literary equivalent of hiding back issues of Playboy under your bed, author Grace Metalious' novel Peyton Place (1957) provided illicit thrills and sexual instruction for an entire generation of erotically curious teens during the '50s. Glued to the bestseller list for 59 weeks, its popularity all but guaranteed the story of passion, sex, incest and murder would be adapted to the screen; the only question was, how much of its racy content would remain? Producer Jerry Wald managed to work around most of the crumbling Hayes Code restrictions while still putting out a firecracker of a film that not only found financial success but also earned nine Academy Award nominations to boot. The film revolves around the sheltered life of Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who finds the constrictive community of Peyton Place - and her own mother, Constance (Lana Turner) in particular - to be creatively and emotionally stifling. Curious about boys but barred from dating, she strikes ...

Just as music fans flocked to vinyl for improved fidelity and collateral coolness, the past decade has seen cineastes celebrating just about every movie made in Korea. And in many cases, the praise is well deserved. From small emotional stories like Sunny (2011) and costume epics like Masquerade (2012), Korean filmmakers have proven they can do anything Hollywood can...and is some cases much better. But it's genre films that have gotten the most exposure, one-upping American monster movies and action flicks with a creative energy lacking in the stuff produced stateside. Even Tunnel (2016), a fairly typical twist on the disaster / survival story, drills down to make a personal impact, rather than relying on special effects to carry the load. Driving through a newly completed tunnel on his way home from work, Jung-soo (Jung-woo Ha) is trapped beneath a literal mountain of rubble, kept safe beneath the fragile shell of his Kia. With a working cell phone, two bottles of water an...

As film historian Julie Kirgo points out in the liner notes for Twilight Time's limited edition Blu-ray of 1967's How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying , by the time Shepherd Mead's original book made it from print to stage to screen, the times they were-a-changing. What was once a spot-on skewering of office politics - and the advertising industry in particular - had become dated, sexist and safe. And the musical itself - one of the studio system's most reliable widgets - was about to be pulled off the assembly line. But, in true capitalistic spirit, if you wait long enough just about everything comes back into fashion. And How To Succeed plays now as a much trendier throwback to mod fashions, swinging set design and enjoyably old fashioned assumptions about the opposite sex...no matter which gender you identify with. A window-washer with aspirations, J. Pierpont Finch (Robert Morse) stumbles upon a "How-To" book that catapults him from t...

One of the crowning achievements of "V-Cinema," the Japanese direct-to-video market that peaked in the mid-90s, Dead or Alive and its two sequels paired the reigning kings of the action genre, Riki Takeuchi and Show Aikawa, in a loosely-connected trilogy of hard-boiled action references, yakuza family drama and apocalyptic martial arts. Working with no creative restraints, other than the proscribed low-budgets, director Takashi Miike's "anything-goes" filmmaking philosophy is a dazzling mix of black humor and shock tactics with an over-arcing theme of the importance of human relationships...even between people who aren't human to begin with. Opening with a breathless montage of brutal exposition, DOA (1999) sets the stage immediately for Miike's particular brand of gangster movie. Ryu is an ambitious outsider using his "heroic" status in the underground immigrant community to shoot his way to the top of the Yakuza ladder. Detective Jojim...

Once the slasher genre had run its course, the next logical evolution of the horror film was comedy. Besides clearing hurdles with the MPAA, it opened the door to an entirely new audience that had seemingly become immune to teenagers skewered after having sex. No one knew this better than producer Sean S. Cunningham, whose Friday the 13th franchise finally became self-aware with the sixth chapter by adding a much-needed dose of humor. And that same year, 1986, Cunningham and director Steve Miner had even more sleeper success with their horror-comedy hybrid House , starring William Katt as a horror novelist whose family-life goes to hell after moving into his Aunt's creepy estate. Roger Cobb (Katt) is a Stephen King-style super author facing writer's block after the disappearance of his young son. In an attempt to get the creative juices flowing, Roger moves into the same house where his child vanished, switching gears to write a more personal story about his traumatic e...

Produced three years before Dr. No changed the spy thriller forever - and only a few months after Castro's revolution - Our Man in Havana (1959) is an entirely different sort of cloak-and-dagger affair. Bitingly satirical of the British secret service and cleverly playful towards the genre as a whole, Graham Green's script finds the perfect personification of Hitchcock's "Man Who Knew Too Much (or, in this case, too little ) in Alec Guinness, a mild-mannered vacuum salesman recruited by MI6 to become a spy for Queen and country. But what begins as a lark to make extra cash winds up coming with a hefty bill to pay. Jim Wormold (Guinness) is content enough with his dwindling customer base in pre-revolutionary Cuba, but his blossoming daughter has attracted the attention of an infamous local official, Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs). So when a rather conspicuous British agent (Noel Coward) offers $150 a month in exchange for setting up a network of fellow informants, ...

In Property Is No Longer A Theft (1973), Italian filmmaker Elio Petri lays out his socio-political agenda in almost Shakespearean terms: "To be or to have?" And his cultural condemnation of the evils of capitalism has only become more razor-sharp in the 44 years since the film's release, which never garnered as much attention as his more celebrated efforts like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion . With a dense cinematic text and admittedly unpopular Marxist mindset, the film could have been a slog on both sides of the argument. But Petri, working at the height of his creative powers, delivers a whirlwind of biting black comedy and social commentary, taking aim right at the heart of Man's most tangible temptation: money . Total (Flavio Bucci) is an unstable bank-teller with an allergy to the currency of his profession; even the sight of paper money makes him itch uncontrollably. But this physical manifestation becomes an emotional obsession when he c...

Shot in 1978 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Chilly Scenes of Winter not only shares a birthday with Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival, it also exemplifies the festival's independent-minded approach to storytelling, warts and all. There's something not quite "normal" in this romantic comedy about a civil servant, Charles (John Heard), who falls hard for Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), a spunky temp recently separated from her husband. The fact is, director Joan Micklin Silver's film isn't a romantic comedy at all . But by the time Laura (and the audience) finds out, it's too late to turn the ship around. The film actually kicks off in fantasy / flashback mode with Charles mourning his ruined relationship and carrying on conversations with an imaginary Laura, who's returned to her husband. A cast of quirky characters provides moral support: Sam (Peter Riegert), his perpetually unemployed best friend, Clara (Gloria Grahame), his mentally unstable...

An odd mix of speculative science-fiction, avant garde music and hypnotic time-lapse photography, The Creeping Garden (2014) is a documentary that proves to be about as shapeless as its subject: plasmodial slime molds. Neither fungus or animal, this obscure organism can reach speeds of up to 1.35mm per second, spreading out its brightly colored tendrils to reach the nutrients it needs to survive, spoor and propagate itself once again. When viewed under the microscope, director Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharps' film becomes a psychedelic landscape of shapes, colors and brilliantly organic design. But once the subject shifts to those researchers, artists and amateur mycologists who use slime molds as a pet project, the pace begins to...well... creep . Opening with a 1973 CBS news report of mysterious "blobs" discovered in Texas that dissolved after a few days, The Creeping Garden hooks you with early hints of a mysterious and complex creature existing right under our nos...

Interiors (1978), Woody Allen's first attempt at straight-drama, features a cast of characters so laughably narcissistic it would only take a gentle nudge to push the entire production into broad comedy. Modeled after the depressively beautiful films of Ingmar Bergman, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis recreate the European aesthetic down to the last detail in this story of a wealthy East Coast family struggling to adjust to their parents' separation and impending divorce. Sisters Joey, Flyn and Renata are the product of the financially successful but deeply dysfunctional marriage of Arthur (E.G. Marshall) and Eve (Geraldine Page), each dealing with the uncomfortable demise of the family unit in their own way. Flyn (Kristin Griffith), a TV actress, questions her ability to achieve anything else. Renata (Diane Keaton), a critically lauded poet, suffers from writer's block that seeps into her own marriage to a struggling author (Richard Jordan). While Joey (Mary...

Now in her '70s, Charlotte Rampling has matured into the sort of actress who can hold your attention just by making toast. Which is a skill put to the test in Andrew Haigh's domestic tragedy 45 Years , a film that mines the drama lurking beneath the daily routines of a marriage on the cusp of disintegration after nearly half a century of comfortable mediocrity. Kate (Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) have long since settled into the predictable roles of a retired couple, with Kate mothering her rather irresponsible partner through the challenges of old age. But when a letter arrives informing Geoff about the discovery of the body of his old girlfriend - frozen and completely preserved in glacier after a hiking accident - their relationship begins to fray. The news hits Geoff harder than it probably should have, considering the time involved, which arouses Kate's feminine suspicions. Some mild snooping reveals that Geoff's old flame (ironically named Katya) playe...

Judging films on the basis of box office returns seems patently unfair. But judging them based on audience disinterest probably has some merit. And, surprisingly, Passengers generated little more than a collective "meh" when it was released last year. Surprising not only because it starred two of the most bankable and beloved actors of the decade, but also sported a catchy concept based on a lauded script set in a genre that's riding an all-time high. En route to a new world aboard the colony Starship Avalon, Jim (Chris Pratt) is rudely awoken out of hypersleep with roughly 89 years left to go before he and his 5000 fellow passengers reach their destination. With no way to reactivate his hibernation pod or contact the crew, Jim is suffering from a case of fatal loneliness - his only source of comfort, a chatty cybernetic bartender (Michael Sheen) - until he realizes he has the technological know-how to wake up someone else to share in his misery. Of course, this...

Part of the post-war push to create more authentic motion pictures far from the typical Hollywood soundstage, 1947's Kiss of Death uses a bevy of impressive NYC interiors and exteriors to tell screenwriter Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer's tragic tale of Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), a hard-luck gangster who names names to keep his family from falling apart. But the film's most memorable figure is the larger-than-life Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), an ambitious punk on the way up whose villainous giggle will be left ringing in your ears. Directed in unassuming style by Henry Hathaway (not unlike the approach Hitchcock would take in The Wrong Man ), Kiss of Death 's reputation as a film has been overshadowed by Widmark's Oscar nominated performance...and deservedly so. A pair of suspenseful opening and closing scenes bookend what is otherwise a fairly plodding piece of work shot in a deliberate documentary style that's more dated that most newsreels of the day. ...

The 1950's were the heyday of cinematic science fiction. While visitors from another planet invaded in The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Blob, and The Thing , a constant onslaught of irradiated monsters like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms lumbered onto movie screens on a weekly basis. But the genre was healthy enough to support hundreds of more obscure efforts that still require some skill to track down. 1956's World Without End , a time-traveling apocalyptic spacer with enough similarities to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine to warrant a lawsuit, is just such a minor entry, bringing along a tribe of one-eyed mutants and sexy future chicks just for fun! After completing a survey mission to Mars, four astronauts are accelerated through time and space, only to land on a future Earth where the surface is ruled over by savage "beast men" while the civilized society remains below ground, their courage and vitality slowly draining away. The female of the species,...

In 1959, the movies still served as a sort of "staycation," allowing audiences to see the world without leaving their local theater. While studios often glommed this travelogue approach onto existing creative properties (e.g. King Solomon's Mines or Ian Fleming's Bond adaptations), they weren't above milking locations a little closer to home for some dramatic appeal. Case in point, director Don Siegel’s Edge of Eternity , which stages a rather lackluster noir / mystery in one of the most spectacular settings in North America: the Grand Canyon. Les Martin (Cornel Wilde) is the Deputy Sheriff of a faded Arizona mining town suddenly facing a string of murders. His instincts lead him to the Kendon family, whose patriarch owns the local gold mine, which went belly-up after WW2. After a string of dead ends and more bodies, daughter Janice Kendon (Victoria Shaw) proves to be a wealth of information - and romantic possibilities. Together they begin to link the k...

The Italian film industry was never just content to spot a trend, they had to top it! Everything from westerns to gothic horror to sex comedies were emulated and then exaggerated to offensive extremes. Case in point, Franco Posperi's Wild Beasts (1983) which doesn't just choose one species to let loose upon mankind, but an entire zoo full of PCP-crazed animals! Though it's a bit late to the "nature run amok" party, the film sends the sub-genre out with an unforgettable highlight reel of rats, cats, cheetahs, elephants and polar bears out for blood. Prosperi himself was already a legend in exploitation history, having been responsible for the Mondo film craze - a series of fearlessly shocking and titillating travelogues that later inspired ill-conceived copycats like Faces of Death - with co-director Gualtiero Jacopetti. Here he's working under equally dangerous circumstances with the same intent: to capture something onscreen that has never been...

While not the first direct follow up to One Million Years B.C. - that would be the Prehistoric Women , which was in the works before the Raquel Welch classic was even finished shooting - Hammer Films' When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) is the studio's only other attempt to incorporate stop motion special effects in one of its "Lost World" adventures, this time shepherded by Jim Danforth instead of Ray Harryhausen, who was otherwise engaged. The result is certainly impressive on a technical level (Danforth's work was nominated for an Oscar) but fairly insipid when it comes to everything else. Former Playmate of the Year Victoria Vetri takes over as the resident prehistoric hottie, Sanna, who escapes ritual sacrifice by her native tribe and washes ashore into the arms of Tara (Robin Hawdon), part of a much more progressive clan of hunter-gatherers. But Sanna's sanctuary is cut short thanks to a jealous cavegirl and the dogged pursuit of her sun-god wo...

There are those who insist life is too short to watch bad movies. In that case, they should stay far away from A.P.E. , director Paul Leder's ultra-low budget King Kong knock-off that feels interminable despite running only 87 minutes. That's because the film, allegedly produced for a under $25,000, is padded with so many one-sided telephone calls, parading army vehicles and fleeing Koreans that the big gorilla himself (an actor wearing the least convincing costume available at Party City) hardly gets much screen time. But when he does, at least it's in glorious 3D! Arriving in Seoul to film her latest role, famous American actress Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns - from Growing Pains ) winds up being the object of the 36-foot ape's affections as he scampers cross country stomping on as many buildings as the budget allows. Her boyfriend and the Korean police remain in pursuit while an American Colonel (Alex Nicol) shouts orders into his phone from the comfort of a bl...

One Million Years B.C. (1966) is one of the few movies where Ray Harryhausen's prehistoric creations actually have to compete for your attention. Raquel Welch and her fur bikini, immortalized by pop culture posters, is every bit as eye-popping in the role of Loana, a fair-haired cavegirl who teaches the finer points of life to Tumak (John Richardson) a rough-and-rowdy exile from a neighboring tribe. As the pair dodges dinosaurs, natural disasters and cannibalistic missing links, the film gets by without a single word of English dialogue, delivering one of the most memorable stop-motion spectaculars of the era. The biggest success in Hammer Films' history (a company known far better for its gothic horror output) actually began as a remake of Hal Roach's 1940 version, which starred Victor Mature and Carol Landis running away from photographically enlarged lizards and snakes. Producer Michael Carreras (who also wrote the script) upped the ante by bringing in Harryhausen t...

Mixing the groovy counter-culture aesthetic of Easy Rider with the cheap thrills of a zombie movie doesn't even seem cinematically possible . But somehow Psychomania (1973) manages to make the combination work by bucking the conventional idea of the "undead" and adding a health dose of black humor besides. Rich-boy rebel Tom Latham (Nicky Henson of Witchfinder General) leads a biker gang called The Living Dead, tearing around the countryside and generally pissing off Establishment-types like his mother (Beryl Reid), a famous spiritualist, and her curiously obtuse butler (George Sanders, who killed himself soon after production). Anxious to use his mother's supernatural knowledge for his own gain, Tom discovers the secret to life after death, returning from the grave with incredible strength and a huge chip on his shoulder. The rest of The Living Dead soon join up and these Death Wheelers (which also serves as an alternate title) hit the road. Not quite zombi...

Movies about the movies are a bit of a cheat; we wouldn't be watching if we didn't already share the same love of cinema and recognize the collateral impact it has on our lives. Cinema Paradiso (1988) reaches further back into film history than usual, following young Toto's obsession with the movies and, in particular, the projection room, which sets him on course to become a professional filmmaker. Based on writer/ director Giuseppe Tornatore's own experiences growing up in his small Italian village in the 1950s, the movie is an idealized reflection of life projected on the screen; full of colorful supporting characters, faded love-interests and the theater that brings them all together. Salvatore - "Toto" for short - is a precocious kid whose only father figure is the surly projectionist, Alfredo, working in the theater where they both spend most of their time. Begging for a chance to work the equipment, Toto eventually serves an apprenticeship und...

1954's The Mad Magician does a lot of things well. Unfortunately, almost all of them are lifted directly from the previous year's surprise hit House of Wax , both starring Vincent Price as a talented technician out for revenge. In fact, producer Bryan Foy reunited most of the major players in an attempt to replicate the latter film's success, carrying over the 3D gimmick but keeping things in black-and-white. The lack of color isn't so much of a problem; the lack of originality is another story. Don Gallico (Price) is an inventor of magic tricks; not just slight of hand, but elaborate and cumbersome machinery like "The Buzzsaw' and "The Crematorium" designed to wow the audience with high tech illusions. After years of watching other magicians take the credit, Gallico decides to put himself up on stage. But contracts and legalities prevent him from doing so, ending his theatrical career before it even had a chance to begin. Enraged by his...

Stanley Donen's Two for the Road (1967) is the story of a fractured marriage told in an invigoratingly fractured fashion. The director, a big part of the old Hollywood studio system, winds up incorporating the innovative editing style of French New Wave directors like Godard and Truffaut to cut between the highs and lows of a relationship that seemed almost doomed from the start. Mark (Albert Finney) and Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) begin the movie at each other's throat, yet, ironically, enjoying the financial fruits of their success. A respected architect, Mark's life is pulled in too many directions to give his wife the sort of attention and affection she deserves. Joanna longs for the adrenaline rush of their early romance, spent over the course of a weeks vacation in France. Jumping from one clever transition to the next, Two for the Road shows us Mark and Joanna's life from every perspective at once, cutting between road trips and hotel rooms separated by te...

Like most foreign film industries, Japan has struggled to find its place in the world against the Hollywood juggernaut. But inevitably, independent filmmakers fill the nooks and crannies bigger studios leave behind. Instead of competing against Hollywood head-to-head, they embrace what makes their culture unique. And, in director Takashi Miike's case, throwing in some shock appeal only adds to the international attention. Kicking off his career in the seedy, over-the-top "V-Cinema" arena (direct-to-video features that peaked in Japan in the mid-80s), Miike's work took a big leap forward with what's come to be known as The Black Society Trilogy . Set amongst the grim, gritty but sometimes-ridiculous world of the yakuza (Japanese gangsters), the three films balance intense moments of sex and violence with introspective lead characters and social-political commentary. That might sound like a typical indie cinema roadmap, but Miike, who's garnered just a...

In retrospect, it may seem like the only person still making westerns in the late '70s was Clint Eastwood. But director Alan J. Pakula made a major contribution to the genre with 1978's Comes a Horseman , a quiet but simmering story about dueling ranchers and ambitious oil barons fighting over land rights at the tail end of WW2. Starring Jane Fonda, James Caan and Jason Robards, all at the height of the careers, the film is both an elegiac tribute to the cattle drives, cowpunchers and the rough 'n tumble traditions of big sky country mixed with a more modern, subtle and poetic storytelling technique. Fonda plays Ella Conners, a strong-willed but bitter woman determined to work her late-husband's land despite threatening offers to sell-out to J.W. Ewing (Robards), a soft-spoken dictator determined to piece back together his family legacy. Frank (Caan) has already seen what Ewing is willing to do, barely surviving an ambush that killed his partner (Mark Harmon). ...

First, let's acknowledge the elephant in the room: Spielberg's original Poltergeist, which lay smack dab in the middle of an incredible run of success, both behind the camera and behind the scenes. Although director Tobe Hooper's actual contributions have been whitewashed from the get-go, their collaboration resulted in a best-of-both worlds mix of family drama and edgy exploitation effects. It's a near-perfect rollercoaster ride that filmmakers are still insidiously stealing from. Poltergeist 2 and 3....not so much. But after the franchise slipped off Spielberg's radar, the supernatural adventures of the Freeling family and their daughter, Carol Anne, became a playground for other directors eager to make their mark. First up was Brian Gibson with Poltergeist 2: The Other Side (1986), who had the benefit of a completely reunited cast (including JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson and Zelda Rubinstein as the pint-sized psychic, Tangina) and the support of Richa...