During the depths of the pandemic I found myself re-watching a wacky Warner Brothers musical from the 1930s- Ready, Willing and Able– the one where Ruby Keeler dances atop a giant typewriter at the end of the film. This time…
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Sometimes I can get in a wormhole on YouTube, especially when I’m in the mood for an “old dark house” movie from the 30s and the 40s. I just get a hankering for cantankerous families gathered at crumbling mansions for…
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If ever a movie was in need of rediscovery it’s Deadly Games, a deliriously deranged 1989 French film about a little boy and his elderly grandfather on Christmas Eve battling a fearsome home invader- a psycho dressed in a Santa…
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One of the best defenses for using Botox (the act of injecting toxins in one’s face in order to smooth wrinkles) was made by a rather well-preserved friend of mine. We were talking about Botox and I asked, “why…
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Sometimes only film noir will do. That post-War black & white cinema of existential dread, a landscape of shadowy city streets; seedy bars; and smoke-filled cop precincts. A nighttime universe populated with dangerous dudes and devious dames. But what I…
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I’ve written about inanimate objects that kill in movies, but those were about possessed machinery and killer furniture. While I was lying in bed the other night counting corpses, I began to think of all the weirder items that have…
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One Christmas I received the best present ever- the actual Jason mask prop from one of the films. John Waters had somehow gotten it for me but there was a glitch in the delivery and somewhere along the line it…
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Lately, not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking a lot about paranoia. But in movies, not in crackpot political conspiracy theories. It takes me back to a batch of movies that were permeated with a dark strain of pessimistic dread. I mentioned…
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I was quite young when I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man in a movie theater but the film had a profound effect on me. It was the story of Robert Scott Carey, on vacation with his wife on a boat…
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Most kids love dinosaurs. I remember when I was very young being dazzled by an ad on the back of a comic book that offered a 6 ft. Tyrannosaurus Rex. I sent in my money and weeks later a thin…
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