There is an unprecedented number of sequels opening in theaters this summer. Some are just endless extensions of movie comic book franchises. Maybe people get the culture they deserve, and in troubled times moviegoers crave the comfort of familiarity. Who…
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Recently I bought Troy Howarth’s excellent books- So Deadly, So Perverse (Volumes 1 & 2), covering 50 years of the Italian “Giallo” thriller. “Giallos” were the yellow paperbacks that signified a certain type of sexy mystery, and the movies reflected…
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Many years when I managed a movie theater in Provincetown, Mass. we ran a special film festival to go along with Fantasia Fair: a yearly October transgender convention where former World War II pilots in drag would arrive (with their…
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Personally, I hate the beach. It’s hot. Sand gets up your ass. It’s just so goddamn boring lying there on a towel waiting for a tan line to kick in. Some days just a whiff of Coppertone in the air…
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W. C. Fields was famed for saying “I’ve never met a child I liked.” And, while I rather like whiny, needy, hyperactive little handfuls in real life, on screen I like them best when they’re just plain rotten. The kind…
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In searching relentlessly through the trash can of film history, I tracked down three music-related films that were so cracked I needed to write about them: Young Toscanini is a 1988 film by Franco Zeffirelli starring C. Thomas Howell…
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I recently re-watched the Blu-rays of Psych-Out and The Trip and was instantly plunged back into the era of free love, bell bottoms, sandals, love beads and frugging in a disco under a strobe light. It also made me realize…
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Kids know there are monsters in the world. They see it constantly on TV that there are dark forces at work out there. And now, with the rash of school shootings, it’s upsetting to imagine children spending their entire youth…
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I saw an angel once. It was in the 1970’s- my first summer in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. I consumed several bad clams, got hepatitis and turned the color of a stick of Land O’Lakes butter. One morning, half-crazed with…
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If ever there was a director who deserves critical reevaluation it’s the Czech-born Hugo Haas who wrote, produced, directed and starred in over a dozen movies in the 1950s. Very few are available on home video. In Leonard Maltin’s Movie…
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