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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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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