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A gaslight thriller with film noir and horror elements, The Spiral Staircase (1946) had a gimmick good enough to be remade three times but none of them could top the Robert Siodmak original. The old, dark house scenario traps its cast of characters inside a sprawling mansion where a killer - whose previous victims all suffered from some physical affliction - stalks a mute serving girl shocked into silence from a childhood trauma. Helen (Dorothy McGuire) is understandably nervous after witnessing the latest crime scene. And even more so when her elderly employer, Mrs. Warren, insists she's not safe in their own house, insinuating that the murderer is someone she knows. The Warren brothers are both likely suspects, but so is the seemingly altruistic family physician, Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), who takes an unusual interest in Helen's disability. When a violent storm moves in and the killer's identity is finally revealed, Helen would seem to make the perfect silent victi...

After Psycho II , a film that turned out far better than it had any right to, writer Tom Holland was a relatively hot commodity. So much so that he demanded a shot at directing his own screenplay for Fright Night (1985), one of the most beloved horror flicks of the '80s. But that may never have happened if it wasn't for Scream for Help , an atrociously tone-deaf domestic thriller directed by Michael Winner ( Death Wish ) from Holland's original script about a teenager who thinks her stepfather is trying to murder her mother. Christie suspects her stepfather, Paul, of staging a string of household accidents in an attempt to keep her mother's inheritance all to himself. And after following him around town for days, her instincts are proven correct. But Paul isn't working alone; and his partners won't hesitate to wipe out Christie's family and friends to get what they want. With its uninspired voice-over narration and sleazy marital scheming, Scr...

Imagine if you took that flat, over-lit look of a 1970s sitcom and inserted the most twisted, bizarre scenario you could come up with? The disconcerting result would be The Baby , directed by TV veteran Ted Post, about a family of three scheming women who keep a 20-year-old man-child locked up in a crib. The storyline is unusual enough on its own, but combined with Post’s deadpan visual style (or anti- style) is becomes flat-out disturbing, yet compulsively watchable. Although it’s rated PG, The Baby dances around more images of child abuse, overt sexuality and emotional torture than a David Lynch film. Yet it’s the nuanced performance by former ‘50s starlet Ruth Roman as Baby’s mother, who rules her family like a matriarchal Marlon Brando, that you’ll remember most. Not unlike 1968’s Spider Baby , the Wadsworth’s family ties create a web that hopelessly traps anyone who tries to break them up. The Baby stands alone as one of the most surreal movie experiences of the 1970s. A...

Imagine if you took that flat, over-lit look of a 1970s sitcom and inserted the most twisted, bizarre scenario you could come up with? The disconcerting result would be The Baby , directed by TV veteran Ted Post, about a family of three scheming women who keep a 20-year-old manchild locked up in a crib. The storyline is unusual enough on its own, but combined with Post’s deadpan visual style (or anti- style) is becomes flat-out disturbing, yet compulsively watchable. Although it’s rated PG, The Baby dances around more images of child abuse, overt sexuality and emotional torture than a David Lynch film. Yet it’s the nuanced performance of former ‘50s starlet Ruth Roman as Baby’s mother, who rules her family like a matriarchal Marlon Brando, that you’ll remember most. Not unlike 1968’s Spider Baby , the Wadsworth’s family ties create a web that hopelessly traps anyone who tries to break them up. The Baby stands alone as one of the most surreal movie experiences of the 1970s. And...

For those who rarely dig deeper into cinema history than BuzzFeed best-of lists, 1972's The Hot Rock will be a revelation. How did a heist film starring Robert Redford, based on a novel by the legendary Donald Westlake - with a screenplay by the equally legendary William Goldman - not crack anyone's top ten?! This caper comedy is long overdue for rediscovery, staging not one but four heists as our team of semi-pros attempt to steal - then recover - a precious African diamond. Redford plays recently un-incarcerated thief Dortmunder, the brains behind a four-man operation hired by an African diplomat to liberate the ceremonial stone from its display case in a New York museum. But with each step forward, the plan takes one step back as the stone falls into the wrong hands time and time again, forcing the team to elaborately break into a prison, police station and bank vault to track down their missing property. The audience isn't privy to the planning; the real thrill...

No matter how worldly or open-minded you are as a cinema fan, there's always something lost in translation when it comes to a foreign film. Japanese culture in particular presents an interesting challenge involving traditions, rituals and social obligations that can seem laughably complex. Bloody Speak at Mount Fuji (1955) would seem to complicate the situation even further by being set during the Edo era, the same historical staging area as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai released a year earlier. But, like Kurosawa, director Tomu Uchida seems to go out of his way to introduce the Japanese caste system, which sharply divided servants from their masters, in such a way that his story has universal appeal. A road movie of sorts, Sakawa Kojuro is a samurai traveling with his two servants, Genta and Gonpachi, to deliver a ceremonial gift. But the road is crowded with fellow travelers en route to a local festival whose stories intersect with Kojuro and his companions. A dedic...

Just because a film is "formulaic" doesn't necessarily mean it's a waste of time. After all, repetition of storytelling techniques is a common device even in literary circles, so why should the cinema be held to a higher standard? But it's those films that deviate from the expected formula, even in small ways, that leaves the most lasting impression...for good or bad. In Italy, the giallo (a sexy, murder mystery) is defined by its body count approach in much the same way as the American slasher film. Yet, The Pyjama Girl Case (1977), produced at the tail end of the genre's lifespan, doesn’t follow the formula as we know it. Based on an actual Australian police case in the 30’s, Ray Milland gets top billing as Inspector Thompson, a retired cop who bullies his way onto a case involving a Jane Doe found shot, beaten and burned on a public beach. Other than a pair of tattered yellow pajamas, the body offers few clues. So few, in fact, that the police pres...

If the success of 1969's Easy Rider proved one thing, it's that Hollywood had no idea what it was doing. The studios were playing catch with an audience that was one step ahead of them and an accidental windfall like the Peter Fonda / Dennis Hopper counter culture phenomena wasn't going to happen every week. So they handed over the creative reigns to a generation anxious to do something different resulting in a watershed moment for American cinema in the early '70s. But sometimes, those responsible for such creative innovation got left behind. For his directing debut, Peter Fonda probably couldn't have chosen a more risky project than The Hired Hand (1971). The low-budget affair wasn't financially precarious, but saddling up in a genre that his famous father pretty much owned was a far cry from his previous success as a pot-smoking, motorcycle-riding rebel. And, as an actor, Fonda pales in comparison, cutting the same lanky, dramatic figure, but wit...

Horror, as a genre, is infinitely adaptable; meaning the same story can be repurposed by different filmmakers with entirely different results. For example, Impulse (1984) and Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988) share a government-conspiracy, environmental disaster plot line that is nearly identical. Yet the style, tone and execution of each script veer in wildly different directions. Produced well-before the cinematic zombie renaissance, Impulse feels like the illegitimate love-child of George Romero's The Crazies and Cronenberg's Shivers mixed in with a few chapters of Stephen King's The Stand for good measure. But despite those better-known inspirations, director Graham Baker's film has a leg up on all of them by virtue of its superior cast and production values. Arriving in the small town of Stubbenfield, big city power couple Jennifer and Stuart immediately notice that something is amiss: people are becoming emotionally unhinged, acting upon their ...

Sure, Prozac and Zoloft are a miracle of medical science. But for a natural pick-me-up, you can't do much better than My Sister Eileen , a zippy 1955 musical from Columbia with a screenplay from Blake Edwards and cutting-edge choreography by none other than Bob Fosse, who's also one of the co-stars in this story of two Ohio sisters trying their luck on the mean streets of Manhattan. With an emphasis on footwork over catchy songs (although it has a couple of those, to boot), director Richard Quine's film puts plenty of razzle-dazzle on the screen...and a good amount of stars, too! Arriving from Columbus with dreams of making it big, Ruth Sherwood (Betty Garrett) and her sister Eileen (Janet Leigh) have no job prospects and a quirky apartment full of equally quirky - but encouraging - residents. A natural beauty, Eileen tests the waters as an actress with the help of a local soda jerk (Fosse). Ruth, used to playing second best, attracts the attention of a playboy publ...

Though its poster promises monumental entertainment the likes of Ben Hur and similar Hollywood historical epics, 1965's Genghis Khan is a really nothing of the sort. Sure, there are a pair of battle sequences involving hundreds of armored extras, swordplay, stuntmen and stunt horses, set against an impressive widescreen landscape. But they're almost presented as afterthoughts in this story of Temujin, a Mongol boy raised as a prisoner of war who rises to power by uniting the warring tribes of central Asia, eventually earning the title Genghis Khan: ultimate ruler. Director Henry Levin's take on things is much more character (or in some cases, caricature ) driven, starting with Tauzin’s escape from captivity and recruitment of new soldiers to establish his empire from the ground up. Traveling to China, he finds a world of wisdom at his fingertips, but chafes at his position as second in command. Ambition drives him further west, swallowing up new recruits and conqu...

Relationship movies - specifically romantic ones - offer seemingly infinite variations on the theme of love. Maybe that's because, besides our own emotional hang-ups, society is always introducing new speed bumps in the path of true happiness. Such is the case with 1970's Take A Girl Like You , a romantic comedy that runs head first into the sexual revolution and comes back with a bit of a concussion. Set in a small English town, professional bachelor Patrick Standish (Oliver Reed) sees his seduction of the new teacher in town, Jenny (Hayley Mills), as just another conquest. But when she thwarts his sexual advances on the grounds of retaining her virginity, Patrick begins, first, to question "why"....then to question the very lifestyle that he - and the new social mores of free love and sexual liberation - have taken for granted. An odd mixture of meet-cute clichés (set to saccharine-sweet pop songs from The Foundations, no less) and serious emotional pathos, di...

There's really no defense for a movie like Doom Asylum (1987) - a prefabricated cult horror/comedy that typifies the straight-to-video market of the era. With a cast of ex-centerfolds (Patty Mullen), genre veterans (Ruth Collins), up and comers (Kristin Davis of Sex and the City ) and a slew of one-and-dones, the film should have simply vanished into VHS purgatory. But there's something so left-of-center about director Richard Friedman's slice of '80s cheese that it survives as a bizarre shared experience, like a cinematic chain letter no one wants to end. After a car accident, Mitch Hansen winds up on the coroner's table. Trouble is, he's not quite dead. Mad with grief over the death of his hot girlfriend, he kills the technicians about to cut him open and takes up residence in an abandoned asylum where he become the stuff of local legend. 10 years later, a pack of wandering partygoers fall right into his lap, providing a new supply of victims for h...

At its peak, the Italian film industry had no qualms about cannibalizing a successful genre until there was nothing left but a picked over skeleton. But in 1971, Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was still a ripe source of material (and titles) for producers to emulate, pushing the giallo format to new levels of onscreen sex and violence. The Case of the Scorpion's Tail is actually more restrained than some latter titles, but still offers up one heck of a bonkers screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi and energetic direction from Sergio Martino, the two of whom would collaborate several more times in the coming decade. After the death of her husband, Lisa Baumer travels to Greece to collect on the million-dollar insurance policy. But her every move is watched by a greedy mistress out for a piece of the fortune and an insurance agent, Peter Lynch (George Hilton) who suspects it's all a big scam. After a series of murders - and an attempt on his life - Peter...

It seems like there's a new cultural touchstone discovered in the martial arts genre every 6 months or so, such is the impact of home video on a cult of fandom that once traded VHS tapes by mail to hunt down the complete Shaw Brothers library or that rare early appearance by Jackie Chan. So with the induction of Dragon Inn (1967) as part of the Criterion Collection, one might be tempted to dismiss the film as a lesser effort from director King Hu whose poetic A Touch of Zen already made its special edition debut. But as his first project outside of China (Hu started his own company in Taiwan after breaking off from the Shaw Brothers), Dragon Inn is yet another essential title in the ever growing library of wuxia films whose impact lingers far beyond the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phenomenon. Situated on the edge of open desert, the Dragon Inn is invaded by a small army of assassins hired to ambush the family of a condemned government official. But as they wait, the Inn ...

The film that almost won director Vincent Ward the Alien 3 assignment (although his influence on the screenplay is still strongly felt), 1988's The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey has aged surprisingly poorly. A time travel adventure set during the Black Death, a small village's only hope for survival relies on the visions of a young boy who leads a team deep underground to find the far side of the world. Instead, they pop up in contemporary Auckland, New Zealand, where their desperate mission to place a sacred cross atop the tallest church spire is fraught with all the perils of modern life like highway traffic and elevated trains. Alternately cute, quirky and pretentious, Ward's more overt art film tendencies are relegated to the lead character's visions of the future (which look like leftover footage from Bergman's Wild Strawberries mixed with The Hobbit ) while the rest of the film leans towards an audience friendly fish-out-of-water tale. The director ...

Film critics used to talk a lot about chemistry, that inexplicable pairing of two stars who just seem to "get" each other. With genuine movie stars, particularly of the female variety, all but extinct these days, it's pretty much a moot point; films are packaged around a concept rather than characters. But it wasn't an exact science even then. Take 1942's My Gal Sal , a pretty typical 20th Century Fox musical starring the completely atypical Rita Hayworth. In this based-on-a-true story adaptation of the life of songwriter Paul Dresser, an Indiana born preacher's son who works his way from traveling medicine shows to the toast of New York's high society, she's paired up with Victor Mature, whose rugged features and frankfurter fingers are a poor match for a dashing tunesmith. But such is the charm and allure of Hayworth that it doesn't really matter who she's paired with; she commands her co-star's - and the audience's - a...

Japan pumped out Yakuza films by the hundreds from the late '50s through the '70s, endlessly kick starting careers and franchises to fight off the lure of television until the studio system finally crumbled. Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards ! (1963), starring Jo Shishido as a tough-talking private eye who inserts himself into a gang rivalry, offers up something a bit different. More of an American film noir with musical intermissions, Seijun Suzuki's film is a kitchen sink of private dick clichés, including a misunderstood femme fatale, comic relief sidekicks and some great one liners that would've made Bogart jealous ("I didn't deserve that slap, so I gave it back to you.") After a series of hijackings that pit one gang against the other, Tajima (Shishido) goes undercover to find out who's pulling off these risky Yakuza raids. His investigation requires a phony name and elaborate back-story, dodging old girlfriends, even performing...

It's understandable if spaghetti western fans are a little gun-shy about adding new titles to their collection. After all, the genre cannibalized itself to the point where it was hard to tell a Dollars knock-off from a knock-off of a knock-off. Arrow Video's 5-disc Complete Sartana box set is about at legit as things get in the Italian film industry, gathering the original If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death and four other films in the series, the majority starring Gianni Garko (George Hilton takes over for the final entry) as the dapper, quick-draw, card-sharp whose nose for gold seems to put him in the middle of a dangerous situation wherever he goes. While the series starts off as a Leone clone, things get more interesting with each sequel, particularly Light the Fuse...Sartana is Coming , with a script by giallo innovator Ernesto Gastaldi that blends the two genres brilliantly, layering a series of double-crosses so deep the plot becomes intentionally comical. ...

Furthering their trip down the New Zealand filmmaking rabbit hole, Arrow Films have released Vigil (1984) the debut narrative film from director Vincent Ward whose follow-up, The Navigator (1988), would point him toward a Hollywood career that never fully materialized. But here we see the visionary look that attracted so much attention in its nascent form, set against the almost otherworldly New Zealand landscape. Dealing with sex, death and magic, all intermingled in the mind of a 10-year-old girl on the edge of puberty, Vigil is both a family drama and a dark fantasy. After the death of her father, Toss (Fiona Kay) and her mother struggle to run the family farm with the help of her eccentric grandfather. But the arrival of mysterious handyman, who also was also present at her father's death, sends Toss' already vivid imagination into overdrive. Both attracted and repelled by the stranger, her reality becomes skewed by the domestic disturbance, clinging to promises of...

While an understanding of visual storytelling seems to be imparted in the womb these days (is Nielsen tracking fetus viewing trends, I wonder?), believe it or not, the language of cinema had to be invented. Close-ups, wide-shots, cross-cutting; the mechanics of the modern blockbuster all have their origin in The Birth of a Nation (1915), director D.W. Griffith's sprawling three-hour silent epic set amongst the political and social turmoil of the Civil War. The Stonemans and the Camerons, once a cordial pair of families, find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict, destroying romantic relationships and turning lifelong friends into unwilling enemies. The crux of the argument revolves around slavery, leading to the heroic rise of the Ku Klux Klan, who gather their forces to defeat the unleashed Negro menace. Yes, that's Griffith's take on history, based on a novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan . There's no defense for the film's p...

Supporting actors are more than just an anything-goes Academy Awards kickoff category; in the right circumstances - and despite minimal screen time -they can push everyone else right into the background. Take 1956's Hilda Crane , starring Jean Simmons as the titular modern woman, returning to her small-town roots and finding it difficult to adjust to common old-fashioned notions like marriage, kids and social compromises. The film, part of a wave of movies that questioned just what it meant to be a woman in post-war America, is predictably melodramatic and stagey (having been adapted from the play by Samson Rephaelson). It's 20th Century Fox quality through and through, but it's also a dreadful bore. That is until the entrance of Evelyn Barnes as Mrs. Burns, the overprotective prospective mother-in-law who takes an instant dislike to Hilda's scandalous past and is intent on breaking up the romance with her wealthy son, Russell (Guy Madison). Barnes takes a characte...

Even within the horror-exploitation fan community, Last House on the Left (1972) is a legendarily divisive film. It's not the most explicit in the rape-revenge genre ( I Spit on Your Grave takes things a bit further) and certainly not the most polished ( Night Train Murders tells the same story with much more style), but it staked its claim early as the premiere example of the heights (or depths) of which '70s horror was capable of achieving. Director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham, with a pair of adult features behind them, knew the genre's success would soon be measured on a sliding scale of smut and pushed the limits relentlessly. On their way home from a concert, Mari and Phyllis are kidnapped by a quartet of escaped criminals who drag them to a supposedly isolated forest where they humiliate, rape and murder them. As fate would have it, the scene of the crime is only a short walk from Mari's home where her parents, having discovered the bodies...

Science (and the porn industry) has proven conclusively that visual stimulation is a powerful part of male arousal. And for those with an obsessive nature, sex can be as addictive as any drug. Writer / director Paul Schrader specializes in characters with just those sort of psychological fixations, making him a good match for Auto Focus (2002), the dramatized biography of Bob Crane, star of TV's Hogan's Heroes whose murder seven years after the show wrapped remains unsolved to this day. Schrader's film, however, is more interested in the career-killing spiral of compulsive sexual activity that put Crane on this tragic path in the first place. A successful radio DJ reticent to star in a comedy about the Holocaust, Crane (played with creepy sincerity by Greg Kinnear) is a charming and likable family man who uses his overnight success to seduce every woman he meets, recording his conquests on videotape with the help of his techie wingman (Willem Dafoe). But as word of...

A film doesn't have a responsibility to be timeless . In fact, as an art form, cinema works best as a reflection of the era in which it was made. But sometimes art reveals how little we've actually changed as a culture, for better or worse, as in the case of two new releases from Twilight Time, starting with No Down Payment (1957), an early canary-in-coal mine criticism of America's post-war obsession with capitalism that is still accurate enough to give anyone the shivers - Republican or Democrat! Ensconced in a perfectly landscaped neighborhood full of houses no one can quite afford, a gaggle of upwardly mobile residents are introduced to the newest members of the club: newlyweds David & Jean Martin who are quickly co-opted into a parade of marital problems including alcoholism, overspending, thwarted ambition, overt racism and rape. Sly subverting the old adage, "If you lived here, you'd be home by now!" director Martin Ritt elevates the melo...

Hammer Films may have kickstarted the Euro-horror scene with 1958's Horror of Dracula , but its influence traveled far and wide, eventually circling the globe to inspire a series of Japanese vampire films produced under the Toho banner gathered here as The Bloodthirsty Trilogy . 1970's The Vampire Doll is the flat-out creepiest of the bunch, although the title is a bit of a misnomer. Lifting its major plot twist from Poe's The Fact in the Case of M. Valdemar (and Roger Corman's film adaptation in Tales of Terror ), vampirism never comes into play, but director Michio Yamamoto creates a Gothic-funhouse atmosphere just the same. With reflective cat eyes, long black hair and a goosebump-inducing grin, his "ghost-girl" antagonist is a tragically terrifying figure. The subsequent sequels, Lake of Dracula (1971) and Evil of Dracula (1974) steal more liberally from the Hammer horror model, going so far as to cast a "head vampire" in full Christo...

When it comes to the giallo genre, fans can be just as obsessive in their pursuit of obscure titles as the hyper-violent, sexually deviant killers that feature in them so prominently. Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973) actually straddles the line between a typical over-the-top giallo mystery and a supernatural story straight out of the Italian Gothic tradition. Arriving with no memory at the home of a pair of wealthy landowners, Greta (Ewa Aulin) seems content to bounce between affairs with both husband and wife, covering her mysterious backstory with a trail of dead bodies, including an overly curious doctor (Klaus Kinski) convinced she holds the key to his scientific research. Directed by sleaze-maestro Joe D'Amato (using his real name for the first time) the film is a kitchen-sink conglomeration of incest, murder, sex and super-science crafted with a sloppy sort of style. The period setting makes the film feel like a better-made cousin to some of Jess Franco's output...

After the death of the slasher genre in the late '80s (and before its rebirth as a series of self-aware inside jokes in the late '90s) the horror genre found a comfortable groove on home video. All that was required was a splashy title and eye-catching artwork to lure in the 2 for 1 rental audience. But, quite often, the freedom afforded filmmakers at this level produced some legitimate classics. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) isn't one of them. But it is a well-meaning tribute to classic sci-fi schlock like The Blob and Invaders from Mars that is far cleverer that its title suggests. Setting up camp under their extraterrestrial big top, a clown-car full of pasty-faced antagonists hunt down the residents of a small town, imprisoning them in cotton candy cocoons and drinking their blood through crazy straws. Written and directed by the Chiodo brothers, who pitched in on the Critters series among others, there's certainly no lack of effort expended o...

As captured on film, 1970-something New York City has an almost tactile quality: gritty, grey and dangerous. It's the perfect backdrop for a movie like The Seven Ups (1973), a crime drama with several ties to The French Connection , including star Roy Scheider, technical advisor Sonny Grosso and stunt coordinator Bill Hickman who stages a mid-film thrill ride through crowded city streets that deserves to be on the all-time car chase top ten list! Heading up an elite unit of supercops who specialize in crimes worth at least a seven-year sentence (hence the title), Buddy Manucci (Scheider) has been getting inside information on the local bad guys from his childhood pal, Vito (Tony Lo Bianco). But Vito has been playing both sides, and now a string on mafia kidnappings throws suspicion on Buddy's team as dirty cops. The Seven Ups has so many things going for it - including a passionate performance from Scheider, an ominously epic musical score and the aforementioned chase ...

The follow-up release to Arrow Video's voluminous collection of early films from Japanese genre director Seijun Suzuki is actually more entertaining and approachable than the first installment. Once again, the set contains five films that have never even premiered on DVD in their native country, let alone Blu-ray, marking Suzuki's transition into gangster / thriller program films designed to support higher-profile releases. Two titles - The Sleeping Be a st Within and Smashing the O-Line - feature a pair of journalists determined to expose the drug and human trafficking business. Eight Hours of Terror uses a disaster-film story structure as bank robbers hijack a bus full of eclectic passengers. The Man with a Shotgun transposes the Hollywood western scenario with a remote logging camp as a lone wolf seeking his fiancée’s killers winds up hired as the local sheriff. While Tokyo Knights brings up the rear as the most unusual film of the lot, turning the story of a young...