Cult

When we trot off to a movie are we really going for the acting? Or is it that stirring of the secret trouser snake in all of us that compels us to go? I recall sitting in a movie theater…
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My phone started ringing off the hook. “Al Adamson is dead!” Say it isn’t so. Not the infamous director of Satan’s Sadists, Blood Of Dracula’s Castle and The Naughty Stewardesses. God couldn’t be that vengeful. “And he was murdered!” You’re…
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Finding that right actor for action film fame is a tricky business. Bruce Willis found popularity with the Die Hard franchise but then there was Hudson Hawk. Keanu Reeves struck gold with Speed but it was years before John Wick…
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I’m not sure which I hate more- sports, or movies about them. The formula’s always the same. From Rocky on- there’s the talented but hot-headed rookie; the grizzled but wise coach; the conflict; the come-around; and, finally, the big game.…
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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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