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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I had the weirdest dream the other night. I was in a movie theater watching a film and suddenly the film broke. The frame jerked to a halt and the image caught fire, melting like a bubbling celluloid rose. Of…
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To me, one of the high points this summer is the Blu-ray releases of two great William Castle films by Scream Factory. The Tingler (Scream Factory) A great 1959 William Castle film starring Vincent Price as a doctor studying “fear”…
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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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“Fix us a dvink,” says Renee Harmon, with her molasses-thick German accent, in the hilariously inept action movie Lady Street Fighter, given an astonishing Blu-ray restoration by AGFA. She plays Linda Allen, cop and kick-boxer who has made a date…
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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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One of my many cockamamie jobs was once selling roses on the streets of New Orleans in the 1970s. I had a little cart on the corner of Iberville and Bourbon Street where I sold bouquets of ludicrously priced posies…
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Opening this week at the newly renovated Film Forum (209 Houston Street) is a stunning bio-pic of the thorny later days of former Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico (played with blazing fury by Danish actress Trine Dyrholm). Focusing on the rocky…
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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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