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Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) wasn't exactly a lost film, but every remaining print was in such bad shape, it might as well have been. Anyone who caught the infrequent screenings on Turner Classic Movies could attest that it looked like 10-miles of rough road, with dirt, splices and a warped soundtrack distracting from what those-in-the-know claimed was an unheralded masterpiece of film noir. Well, thanks to a massive restoration by the Criterion Collection, this piece of poverty row history is finally getting its due. Hitchhiking cross country to reunite with his fiancé, Tom (Al Roberts) is a talented pianist who life has hit its own rough patch; and things get rougher when the talkative fellow who picks him up keels over on a lonely stretch of road. Fearing the police will blame him, Tom drives off in the man's car and clothes, assuming his identity just long enough to get to California. But the plan is interrupted by Vera (Ann Savage), a femme fatale who's wis...

Oliver Stone has never been much for subtlety. Perhaps that's what makes him a perfect match for Talk Radio (1988), based on Eric Bogosian's in-your-face play about Barry Champlain, a celebrity shock jock whose on-air crisis of conscience threatens to sabotage the show just before it goes into national syndication. Stone's film takes as much pleasure in crucifying its egotistical protagonist as it does condemning the American public that deified him in the first place. Barry (Bogosian) hosts a successful late-night program, relishing his role as the man everyone loves to hate and prodding callers to extremes of social, political and racial bigotry. And his personal life is equally messy, with life-in girlfriend and sympathetic ex-wife (Ellen Greene) who acts as a life preserver amidst the on-air chaos. Meanwhile, his boss (Alec Baldwin) sweats over each provocative phone call and phony bomb threat in hopes that they'll survive to climb the corporate ladder. ...

Sonny Chiba's Street Fighter films combined the elegant style of Bruce Lee with the ugly grittiness of Charles Bronsan. The success of that grindhouse aesthetic probably brought Chiba the closest of competitors to inheriting the kung fu crown. But Toei Studios weren't taking any chances; the film became a franchise that very same year with Sister Street Fighter (1974), pushing protégé Etsuko Shiomi into the spotlight, with Chiba along for the ride for the sake of continuity. A spin-off in name only - Chiba plays an entirely different character here - Sister Street Fighter has a breakneck pace, stuffing in enough hand-to-hand combat to fill two or three films. There's a semblance of a plot (one that is repeated almost verbatim on each sequel) that introduces us to Koryu (Shiomi), a cute but deadly martial arts student whose brother has been kidnapped by drug smugglers. Teaming up with members of a local kempo school, she must defeat a rogue's gallery of villain...

In 1957, television was still public enemy number one as far as Hollywood was concerned. And while the two industries would learn to co-exist eventually, there were still a few good-natured shots fired over the bow now and then. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? gets in a few good licks on its small-screen rival and the absurdities of the advertising industry, populated by a bevy of booze-soaked, upwardly mobile hacks desperate to save their jobs at all costs (pot...meet kettle). Rockwell Hunter (Tony Randall), however, is a man of integrity, raising his teenage niece, dating a sensible girl and sweating over the creative details of every important account...all with no recognition or respect. But that changes when his pitch for a new ad campaign starring Hollywood bombshell Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) catapults him into the ranks of the executive elite. Not only that, but Marlowe uses him as a promotional boyfriend - "Loverman" - to spite an old boyfriend and keep h...

A fresh-out-of-film-school production, Kolobos (1999) certainly wasn't the launching pad it cast and crew expected it to be. But its early skewering of MTV's Real World clichés and pre-torture porn slashers like Saw make it a bit more worthwhile for forgiving lovers of the genre. There are plenty of clever homages to Italian horror, but you have to be willing to put up with roommates with weak back stories and bad acting habits to get there. Responding to an ad for participants to shack up in a fully-wired rental home and allow their daily lives to be recorded 24/7, five ambitious 20-somethings wind up under lockdown with a serial killer who has rigged up laser-beam deathtraps throughout the property. The weakest link seems to be Kyra (Amy Weber, now best known as a WWE diva!) whose visions of a mutilated madman make the rest of the group suspect she's partly to blame. But as the finger-pointing increases so does the body count and it's likely they all will ...

As a rule of thumb, anything starring Alec Guinness is usually worth a watch; even a film as obscure as 1955's The Prisoner , an unapologetically stagey and political drama that features its fair share of scenery chewing. Based on the notorious show trial of a church official accused of treason by the Hungarian government, director Peter Glenville's production obscures the setting but keeps all the anti-Communist agenda intact. So much so that the film was banned from the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals to prevent any political turmoil. A hero of the resistance and face of the church, The Cardinal (Guinness) is arrested mid-sermon and hauled before an interrogator (Jack Hawkins) whose psychological techniques have previously proven successful in forcing false "confessions" by those who challenge the authority of the State. As the two match wits, the power struggle causes an unexpected transference of sympathies, leaving both men in a compromised situation with c...

An ensemble comedy disguised as a crime caper, Beat the Devil (1953) is quite unlike any other Humphrey Bogart / John Huston collaboration. The pair's previous success on The Maltese Falcon and, more recently, The African Queen , probably earned them a lot of leeway on the project, which, by all accounts, was arranged as little more than a working vacation on the Amalfi Coast of Italy. But to dismiss the film as nothing more than a mostly-improvised drunken cast party is to overlook its unique charms, preeminently the wickedly witty script by Truman Capote and a sparkling performance by Jennifer Jones. The cast of eccentric characters revolves around Billy Dannreuther (Bogart), a failed business tycoon looking for a quick score in a shady uranium deal. His associates are a squirrely, paranoid bunch so afraid of being double-crossed that they fall for the harmless exaggerations of Mrs. Gwendolen Chelm (Jones), a compulsive daydreamer vacationing with her uptight British husband...

While John Wayne would likely win the popular vote for "Most Famous Movie Cowboy," Henry Fonda is the dark horse who quietly gets the job done. Able to take on any role from an affable man of the people to a cold blooded killer, Fonda may not be as irreversibly linked with the West as the Duke, but his performances are undeniably more interesting...even in a movie as confused as The Return of Frank James (1940), director Fritz Lang's first stab at the genre and first film in color. A sequel to 1939's Jesse James , with many actors (including Henry Hull and John Carradine) repeating their respective roles, the plot picks up with the killing of the famous outlaw while his brother, Frank (Fonda), is living anonymously on an Missouri farm. When the law pardons the cowardly Ford brothers, Frank sets out to avenge his kin, saddled with a price on his head and overly eager protégé (Jackie Cooper). The duo buy some time by leading a naive reporter (Gene Tierney, making ...

Transposing many of the western tropes to South Africa, Untamed (1955) winds up being all over the map...in a good way. The film forgoes the usual exposition to abruptly introduce Katie O'Neill (Susan Hayward), a fiery Irish redhead with cutthroat romantic ambitions. After being spurned by her first love, Paul (Tyrone Power), she marries again in hopes of following him to the dark continent where free land awaits those with the courage to claim it. Facing down Zulu tribesmen, catastrophic storms and financial ruin, Katie survives by setting one man against another, leaving a trail of broken relationships behind her in a quest for wealth, success and a slim chance at a happy ending with Paul. It's rather shocking how unlikable Hayward is allowed to be here. Katie - rechristened Katje when arrives in her new home - is essentially a femme fatale, manipulating anything with Y-chromosome that looks her way. And the script revels in the emotional damage with melodramatic zeal...

Lost amongst Brian De Palma's many Hitchcock-inspired thrillers is 1976's Obsession , starring Cliff Robertson as Michael Courtland, a wealthy real estate mogul whose wife and daughter are killed in kidnapping plot gone wrong. Fast-forward 20 years. While on a business trip, Courtland stumbles upon Sandra (Genevieve Bujold), a native Italian who looks exactly like his dear departed wife. A whirlwind romance leads to a wedding date set back in the states. But is Sandra really who she claims to be...or is Courtland's second chance all an elaborate scam? The amount of talent at work on Obsession is staggering. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond ( Close Encounters ) with his typical foggy brilliance, plus a screenplay by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver ) and a score by the great Bernard Herrmann, this is the closest De Palma ever came to straight-up Hitchcock quality. While his subsequent success evolved into a more hyper-sexualized and gleefully violent sizzle reel, here he shoots ...

Although known for its overabundance of style, the thriller genre probably allows for the least amount of creative wiggle room by a director. Audience expectations and plot requirements just don't leave much space for subtext or introspection. Hitchcock was one of the few to crack the code, which explains why most filmmakers blatantly followed his formula for success...with hit or miss results. My Name is Julia Ross (1945) comes closer to the target than most. Directed by B-movie auteur Joseph H. Lewis ( Gun Crazy ), the film's white-knuckle plot involves a struggling working girl who takes a job as a personal secretary to a mysterious mother-son pair. But the next day she wakes up in an isolated seaside estate with new clothes and a new name. Her employers insist she is really Marion Hughes, wife of the mentally unbalanced man of the house, merely suffering from a nervous breakdown. From that intriguing first act, the film rarely takes its foot off the gas, staging s...

By default, most films revolve around a three-act structure, which, optimistically, leads the audience through the story with an engaging beginning, middle and end. However the art of balancing each act with an equal amount of wit, drama, thrills or suspense is an achievement that rarely makes it onscreen. More often a film is slow out of the gate, sags around the middle, fails to stick the landing, or some combination of the three. So why disparage an entire film for one poor act? Rather, let's celebrate those who manage to pull themselves out of mediocrity for one exciting climax! The True Story of Jesse James (1957) uses flashbacks to give us a supposedly fair and balanced profile of the legendary outlaw whose career as a bank robber was instigated as much by the sins of the Civil War as for financial gain. With Robert Wagner in the lead role, Nicholas Ray's film leans towards lionizing James as a misunderstood romantic, almost selfless in his plan to rebuild the liv...

"Road Warrior on the water" is a perfectly accurate pitch for Waterworld , a B-movie concept that became the most expensive production in movie history after the casting of Kevin Costner. The film aspired to nothing more than building off that clever concept, with monstrous practical sets, a tricked-out trimaran and some not-so-subtle environmental posturing buoyed by incredible stunts and an outrageous performance by Dennis Hopper. There are no pretensions, just pulp sci-fi extravagance. But Costner backlash doomed the project from the start, as journalists eagerly reported the rising budget so they could watch the film sink upon release. The fact that Waterworld was actually profitable didn't stop them from labeling it a failure, however. And what should have been a celebration of the last pre-CGI action spectacle of the '90s became a pile-on of unwarranted animosity and exaggerated criticism. There's no denying director Kevin Reynold's film has...

Those who write off the Blaxsploitation genre as merely a glorification of the uglier urban elements of black culture are only half-right. Films like Willie Dynamite (1974) certainly had a love-hate relationship with their lead characters, glamorizing the pimped-out lifestyle - complete with a purple Lincoln town car, mink coats and a stable of beautiful "bitches." But the film pulls the rug out from under the audience and Willie by staging a cinematic intervention that calls for a surprising cultural shift. Attacking the streets with capitalistic fervor, Willie goes against the pimp council (yeah, apparently they have one of those) and instructs his ladies to work wherever and whenever they'd like. But a do-gooder social worker, Cora, who once worked the streets herself, wreaks havoc with his business, turning his women against him and tipping off the cops to badger him with minor offenses. The cumulative effect gets Willie off balance, eventually questioning the ...

Somewhat tedious by giallo standards, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion splits the difference between the plentiful sex and violence typical of the genre and a more highbrow psychological approach. It's a film that keeps you guessing until the final scene (thanks for Ernesto Gastaldi's script) but feels more like a stretched out version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents ...if 'ol Hitch was allowed to really cut loose. Socialite housewife Minou (Dagmar Lassander) is blackmailed by a stranger (Simon Andreu) who has evidence that will implicate her husband in a murder. Desperate to keep him out of prison, she agrees to sleep with the blackmailer to shut him up. But the nightmare continues when a series of photos are delivered to the house, capturing Minou in several compromising positions. When the police finally get involved, all evidence of the alleged affair - and the blackmailer himself - disappears, putting Minou story, and sanity, in question. Gastaldi'...

While collaborations with director Martin Scorsese helped establish Robert De Niro's onscreen persona, his cinematic career began several years before Mean Streets and Taxi Driver ever hit screens. In fact, his early work with director Brian De Palma reveals an actor almost fully-developed from the very beginning, working with the same level of intensity and charismatic appeal. Simply put: the camera loves him. But in films like Greetings, Hi, Mom and The Wedding Party , De Palma's camera takes a far more scattershot approach than his later Hitchcock-inspired genre work. For all it's improvised, counterculture posturing, Greetings (1968) is the most accessible and interesting of the bunch. Following a trio of draft-age young men through Greenwich Village as they attempt to avoid being sent to Vietnam, the fragmentary plot involves computer dating, the Kennedy conspiracy and - most recognizable to De Palma fans - voyeurism. Jon Rubin (De Niro) proposes a series of ...

Under orders from ABC to include more monsters, but saddled with a significantly smaller budget to create them, the new production team behind season two of The Outer Limits (which wound up totaling 17 episodes) had to do more with less. New showrunner Ben Brady fought back with big ideas, adapting source material from sci-fi writers like Harlan Ellison in an attempt to make a strong literary impression...even if the technical execution wasn't always up to snuff. That describes the second season of the cult sci-fi anthology (which ran from 1963 to 1965) fairly well: a collection of great ideas brought to the screen under challenging circumstances. Ellison's two installments are the obvious highlights ( Soldier and Demon with a Glass Hand ), so ahead of their time that James Cameron settled out of court due to the similarities to The Terminator . But ignoring the rest of the episodes is selling the show short, all of which scratch that peculiar sci-fi itch in a way that no...

There was a time when New York City was dangerous, both in the physical and moral sense. A time when hookers were more common than rich housewives with dogs stuffed in their purses. When Times Square was a place to get cheap thrills, not cheap TVs and discount merchandise. The cinema of the ‘70s captured this very well (perhaps none better than Scorsese’s Taxi Driver ), but William Lustig’s Maniac is a worthy document of NYC’s sordid past, a surprising psychological profile and a down ‘n dirty exploitation movie to boot. Joe Spinell plays serial killer Frank Zito as a tortured soul, driven to murder by the memory of his prostitute mother. The fact that his character evokes sympathy despite the atrocity of his crimes (expertly and gruesomely executed by Tom Savini, who also has a small role) is a testament to both Lustig’s direction and Spinell’s performance. By all rights Maniac should have been simply another Halloween clone (it was certainly advertised as such) but instead...

Despite being the second-highest grossing film of director Robert Altman's illustrious career and stuffed with a who's who of British acting talent, Gosford Park has been almost entirely eclipsed by the BBC show that was initially created as a spin-off of the same: Downton Abbey . But Julian Fellowes' success with his small-screen follow-up should in no way diminish Altman's ensemble who-dun-it, which establishes the ground rules for the upstairs / downstairs class dichotomy with a complexity that frustrates and fascinates in equal measure. As the guests arrive for an overnight shooting party (attendees include Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles Dance, Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Ryan Phillippe and Maggie Smith among others), the stage is set for a muted melodrama between the ruling class and their long-suffering servants. Family patriarch William McCordle (Michael Gambon) is despised by most of his blood relatives and bedding most of the female staff. So...

If Zombie represents the pinnacle of Italian excess, director Aldo Lado's Short Night of Glass Dolls is its cerebral opposite. Just a year after Argento’s groundbreaking giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage , Lado tried to up the ante with his politically minded thriller, Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971). Featuring a fair share of recognizable stars (Jean Sorel, Ingrid Thulin and Barbara Bach), stunning cinematography and an unsettling Ennio Morricone score, the film is a direct reflection of Lado’s enthusiasm as a first-time filmmaker. The raw ingredients are nothing special within the genre – Bach disappears without a trace, Sorel tracks her down amidst a crowd of likely suspects – but the director uses a clever flashback technique to tell the story. Trapped in a cataleptic state, journalist Gregory Moore (Sorel) is wheeled into the city morgue, desperately trying to communicate with the technicians who've already declared him dead. As Moore struggles to recall...

Fulci Lives! Never heard the expression? Attend any horror convention across the country you’ll see more T-shirts with this slogan than mullets at a rodeo. That’s because Lucio Fulci, the Italian director behind Zombie, really knows how to impale an eyeball. Zombie is, if not the director’s most accomplished film, certainly his most bankable thanks to the pseudo-sequel tie-in with Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Fulci, though, doesn’t waste his time with social satire or dark comedy but gets right down the bloody business of loosing his zombie horde on the world (or at least, the parts he can afford the location costs). The film opens with a very effective Nosferatu image of an abandoned sailboat drifting into New York harbor. Well, almost abandoned. On board is a decomposing but dangerous zombie escapee from a mysterious South Seas island. This discovery prompts a couple of amateur sleuths – actors Tisa Farrow (Mia’s sister) and Ian McCulloch (not the Echo and Bunnymen singer) – to track d...

Hammer Films released some of the most progressive horror films ever made, including shocking full-color reboots of the Universal monster catalog. But they also produced a good amount of escapist adventure films that fans don't remember near as fondly, including Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), a feature film adaptation of the popular British TV program featuring the exploits of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Part of this cinematic dead zone is due to simple supply and demand: Hammer aficionados haven't really had a chance to appreciate the studio's lesser-known efforts. Twilight Time's 3000-copy limited edition Blu-ray should rectify that somewhat with a fine hi-def transfer courtesy of Columbia Pictures. As for the film itself, well, there's a reason the studio specialized in horror. At his best, director Terence Fisher had a knack for turning stuffy, set-bound stories into intensely terrifying cinema experiences. But the gorgeous outdoor landscapes of S...

A turning point in Brian De Palma's career, Sisters (1972) not only marked the director's move from free-from counter-culture comedies to tightly constructed thrillers, but labeled him as the foremost disciple of Hitchcockian cinema, emphasizing camerawork as much as (and often more than ) his characters. But instead of riffing on just one particular Hitchcock film, Sisters bounces from one "inspiration" to another, using the backbone of Rear Window and Psycho as a launching point for De Palma's original story of conjoined twins whose physical separation causes a dangerous mental break. Dominique and Danielle (both played by Margot Kidder) slipped out of the public eye after their supposedly successful operation at a secretive clinic on Staten Island. Dominique, the charming and outgoing sister, brings home a potential lover (Lisle Wilson) to their apartment, only to have Danielle murder him in a jealous rage. The event is witnessed by Grace Collier (...

One of the most impressive characteristics of genre filmmaking is its endless flexibility. Horror, comedies, Westerns: instead of being confined by their cinematic structure, there's a subversive thrill in watching a clever writer or director stretch the creative boundaries. Released in 1958, The Bravados is a straightforward revenge western starring Gregory Peck...except it's not. Jim Douglass (Peck) is a stoic rancher in pursuit of the four men who killed his family, arriving in Rio Arriba just in time to watch them hang. But a prison break puts him on their trail again, tracking down each outlaw and enforcing his own swift and deadly justice; despite the fact the each man claims they're innocent of the crime. It's that final question mark - along with some disturbing intimations of sexual assault - that makes The Bravados something far more than just another Hollywood oater. There's a dark underbelly to the story that pre-dates the Spaghetti Western...

While Michael Crichton's Westworld is now a buzz worthy HBO show, his other cinematic critique on the perils of a false reality is finally getting a hi-def facelift. In 1981's Looker , Albert Finney is a plastic surgeon set up to take the fall for a string of suspicious suicides involving his supermodel patients. The conspiracy involves a computer-scanning technology (motion capture in today's lingo, still science-fiction in the early '80s) that recreates the actor as a perfect three-dimensional model. But corporate interests see the potential for much more than selling swimsuits and dish soap, forcing them to eliminate any loose ends. The synopsis above is actually a handy reference guide, since Crichton's script isn't exactly sure how or why the bad guys (led by James Coburn) are executing their evil plan. But Looker remains great fun throughout, mostly thanks to the introduction of a clever "looker gun" that hypnotizes its victim with a f...

An elegy for the hardworking street corner politician, John Ford's The Last Hu rrah (1958) presciently tracks the rise of TV-ready public officials, manufactured out of cue cards and staged family cutouts. It makes it tough for a career baby-kisser like Mayor Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy), fighting for re-election against not only his empty-headed opponent, but a cadre of political enemies bearing personal, professional and religious grudges that go back to their rough immigrant upbringings. Our tour guide through this minefield is Skeffington's nephew (Jeffrey Hunter), an apolitical journalist who comes to understand - and even admire - his uncle's sometimes heavy-handed way of getting the job done. But there's no mistake on which side Ford's bread is buttered; that's pretty clear with the casting of Tracey. Called upon to perform some shady maneuvers and a bit of blackmail, underneath is all Skeffington is an honest, generous and deeply moral man...

It's difficult to explain the impact network TV had on pop culture to a generation used to niche programming that's only a click away. Although most content was watered down for mass consumption, there were moments of brilliance that slipped through the cracks of overly lit mediocrity. Trilogy of Terror (1975) is perhaps the most famous of the small-screen fright flicks that warped impressionable minds with the now legendary final chapter of Richard Matheson's anthology, Amelia , involving an African fetish doll terrorizing Karen Black in her own home. But the it's the film's first segment, involving a Twilight Zone take on sexual predators, that has become the most timely. Director Dan Curtis had already had success with the horror genre, masterminding the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows and Night Stalker TV movies and subsequent series. Trilogy of Terror is built around three short stories from novelist and Twilight Zone veteran Richard Matheson, ea...

Although Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetee is part of the basic text in film schools across the country, the time travel photo play was generally unknown to mass audiences. Which made its clever conceit of a man witnessing his own death as a child the perfect starting place for Twelve Monkeys (1995), a much more elaborate (and needlessly complicated) extrapolation of Marker's themes of love, loss and memory. A post apocalyptic "volunteer" sent back to the '90s to gather information on the disease that will destroy humanity, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is promptly locked up in a mental institution where he befriends fellow inmate Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt). A genuine psychotic with nihilistic tendencies, Goines is in turn inspired by James' alternate reality, plotting to use his father's medical research facility to return the world to its true owners: the animals. James eventually convinces his psychiatrist Madeleine Stowe) to help put a stop...