My life at the movies.
Directed by Hy Averback. Starring Patrick O'Neal, Cesare Danova, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Laura Devon.
Warner Bros. shot Chamber of Horrors as a television movie, intended as a series pilot. When the network deemed the finished product too violent for television, the studio added some gimmicks and released it as a theatrical feature. The result looks good but underwhelms. Continue reading...
Directed by Robert Wise. Starring Robert Mitchum, Shirley MacLaine, Edmon Ryan, and Elisabeth Fraser.
In Two for the Seesaw, Robert Mitchum plays a middle-aged, midwestern lawyer who—after his wife of twelve years asks for a divorce—flees his cushy job and pampered lifestyle for New York City. There, he meets a late-twenty-something dancer played by Shirley MacLaine. A romance blooms. Spoilers follow. Continue reading...
Directed by Nick Grinde. Starring Boris Karloff, Roger Pryor, Jo Ann Sayers, and Stanley Brown.
Despite Boris Karloff playing a doctor with a secret underground laboratory where he holds six people hostage as unwilling test subjects, The Man with Nine Lives isn’t a mad scientist picture. It’s a drama centered on an ethical dilemma: Would you risk the deaths of six people to save millions? Continue reading...
Directed by Andrea Bianchi. Starring Karin Well, Gianluigi Chirizzi, Simone Mattioli, and Antonella Antinori.
Teamwork wins. That’s the takeaway from Burial Ground, an Italian zombie horror that packs just enough originality to set itself above the mass of Zombie knock-offs. Continue reading...
Directed by Paul Aratow. Starring Larry Hankin, Jane Brunel-Cohen, Norman Pierce, and Paul Thomas.
I watched Lucifer’s Women after seeing the trailer during Alamo Drafthouse’s Railway to Hell marathon. The trailer paints it as a satanic shocker, but it proves more of a sleazy riff on the Svengali story. Continue reading...
Directed by Jeff Kwitny. Starring Mary Kohnert, Bo Svenson, Victoria Zinny, and Savina Gersak.
Bonkers in the best way possible. Continue reading...
Directed by Ryûhei Kitamura. Starring Bradley Cooper, Leslie Bibb, Brooke Shields, and Vinnie Jones.
Sometimes, frustrating films are worse than bad ones. Such is the case with The Midnight Meat Train. Continue reading...
Directed by Eugenio Martín. Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, and Telly Savalas.
Horror Express may be flawed, but the production, performances, and novelty of genre icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee working as allies make it hard to resist. Continue reading...
Directed by John Carr, Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas. Starring Barbara Wyler, Jamie Scoggin, Stacey Lyons, and Linda Maderas.
For an anthology comprising three unrelated low-budget horror features cut to half or a third of their running time and book-ended by God and Satan riding a train to Las Vegas with an 80s teen pop-rock band, Night Train to Terror is better than you’d expect. Continue reading...
Directed by Chung Sun. Starring Tony Liu, Kuan Tai Chen, Lieh Lo, and Ni Tien.
Human Lanterns may not be a great martial arts movie or a great horror movie, but it proves an intriguing bridge for Shaw Brothers productions. A transitional piece between the straightforward kung-fu actioners like The Five Deadly Venoms that launched the studio to worldwide recognition, and the more overt horrors like The Boxer’s Omen that saw the studio trying to adjust to changing audience tastes. Continue reading...