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Although it's grandfather of modern outbreak movies, 1971's The Andromeda Strain feels more like a reaction to the technological tsunami of 2001: A Space Odyssey than a trendsetter in its own right. Based on Michael Crichton's novel, this is a film that has an endless amount of enthusiasm for the scientific method and emergency quarantine procedures; it's the cinematic equivalent of a TV disclaimer announcement, listing possible side effects and health warnings. Suffice to say, the thrills are few and far between. But director Robert Wise brings some signature style to this story of an alien organism that wipes out a small New Mexico town...and threatens to destroy the world. Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) and his team of academic all-stars are rushed to an underground government facility called Wildfire, specifically designed to handle extraterrestrial threats of the microbiological sort. After working their way through several levels of decontamination proc...

The term film noir gets stretched awfully thin at times, including movies produced at the height of the then unnamed and unrecognized genre's popularity and those that took their inspiration long after. The Big Clock (1948) was released right in the thick of post-war pessimism and certainly shares a good amount of cinematic DNA, yet never really looks the part. Director John Farrow's thriller is a bit bland visually, but compensates with a crackerjack concept that was good enough to inspire a Kevin Costner remake ( No Way Out ) in 1987. George Stroud (Ray Milland) is a workaholic magazine editor who specializes in locating missing people. Pushed to the breaking point by Mr. Janoth, his merciless boss (Charles Laughton), Stroud misses his family vacation and winds up spending the evening with a beautiful woman...who just so happens to be Janoth's mistress. Furious at her indiscretion, Janoth murders her and relies on a business associate to cover up the crime, blamin...

Clint Eastwood’s squint in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy established him as superstar. But Lee Van Cleef, a prolific character actor who spent most of the ‘50s and ‘60s appearing on one TV show after another (seriously, his IMDB resume looks like a substitute teacher’s schedule), enjoyed a career resurgence just by association. After playing opposite the Man With No Name in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly , Van Cleef became a hot commodity among European producers who wanted a bit of that Leone mojo…but on a budget they could afford. The Grand Duel (1972) doesn’t offer the actor much of a stretch performance-wise – his character’s clothes, dialogue and demeanor are much the same as Angel Eyes from Good, Bad & Ugly – but a nifty role reversal casts him as sage gunslinger helping an outlaw framed for murder to clear his family name. The script (by mystery specialist Ernesto Gastaldi) lifts more than a few elements from Once Upon a Time in the West ...

The cardinal rule of horror and sci-fi filmmaking is easy to remember: Never Be Boring . While art films and Oscar winners can lure you in with emotional pathos and pregnant pauses, genre movies need to keep their foot on the gas more often than not. A filmmaking philosophy which works in favor of Terra Formars (2016), a live-action adaptation of the Japanese manga phenomenon that gave director Takashi Miike ( Ichi the Killer ) a chance to one-up his favorite Hollywood action pic, Starship Troopers . Centuries in the future, on an Earth that ironically still models itself after Blade Runner , overpopulation has inspired a terraforming project on Mars that's close to supporting human life. Trouble is, the cockroaches sent along as part of the initial seeding project have rapidly evolved into humanoid pro-wrestlers who have claimed the planet for their own. In response, the government sends an expeditionary force of unwanted criminals to take down the bug army, mixing their DN...

For today's generation, the name Charles Bronson is probably nothing more than an IMDB trivia search to find out who starred in Death Wish before Bruce Willis....if that. But in the early '70s, the actor was the embodiment of gritty a new wave of action stars transitioning from the saddle to a more urban frontier. With Once Upon a Time in the West proving he could eclipse an ensemble cast, Europe came calling with a quick burst of starring roles, proving that in the right hands, Bronson could be much more than a not-so-pretty face. In fact, Rider on the Rain (1970), a Hitchcockian thriller directed by Rene Clement, may very well be the best film in the actor's overstuffed career. After being raped by a stranger who breaks into her home, Melancolie (Marlene Jobert) kills the man and hides his body out shame and embarrassment. But her clumsy cover is blown almost immediately by Harry Dobbs (Bronson), a mysterious investigator who's been tracking the man for hi...

Edward G. Robinson gets a chance to prove his tough-guy persona is all make-believe in The Whole Town's Talking (1935), breezy little mistaken-identity comedy that casts the actor in two roles: Arthur Ferguson Jones, an unassuming law clerk with a secret crush on his co-worker (Jean Arthur), and "Killer" Manion, a notorious criminal whose face is plastered on every newspaper. But it turns out both men share the same face. And after the police arrest Arthur, he becomes an overnight celebrity, attracting the attention of Manion himself who sees an opportunity to use his doppelganger to get revenge. Although his films always featured plenty of comedic elements, director John Ford was never known for cracking-wise (cracking skulls? Maybe.) But he handles the body-swapping humor of The Whole Town's Talking with an exceptionally light touch, bolstering Robinson's showy dual role with a supporting cast that's more than up to the challenge (although more Jean...

It took nearly two decades, but the Quentin Tarantino stamp of approval is now pretty much worthless. Not only is QT himself less relevant on the pop culture scene - throwing hissy fits about leaked scripts and threatening retirement - but his liberal championing of dozens of films, while an admirable mission to educate the masses, has oversaturated the market. The Street Fighter series was on his agenda early, even popping up in his screenplay for True Romance . And while the Sonny Chiba trilogy is more than worth kung fu fans attention, it never broke big like Jackie Chan's back catalog. Perhaps because Jackie never pulled off a man's testicles with his bare hands! Built around a character who's more sociopath than anti-hero, The Street Fighter, Return of the Street Fighter and The Street Fighter's Last Revenge (all shot in 1974) have been essentially MIA on home video despite being released domestically by New Line Cinema as one of their earliest acquisiti...

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...