Doris Wishman
Doris Wishman, a prolific independent director of truly tasteless movies — from nudist camp romps to the cult classic ”Bad Girls Go to Hell” — died on Aug. 10 in Miami. She lived in Coral Gables, Fla. She never revealed…
Veronica Carlson
In a three year period, Veronica Carlson was terrorized onscreen by three of Hammer Studios’ most famous male villains: Christopher Lee as Dracula in the 1968 film Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein in Frankenstein…
Drive-in Dream Girls
Drive-in Dream Girls: A Galaxy of B-Movie Starlets of the Sixties by Tom Lisanti “Wildly entertaining … well-researched and informative.” – Editors, Paper; “Lisanti has managed to get some of the forgotten and near-forgotten bombshell divas of Grade B Cinema…
Corman’s The Fantastic Four
…It’s Clobberin’ Time? When Benjamin Grimm first uttered these words, it was his intent to pummel whatever evil menace that threatened humanity yet not even the all-knowing Watcher would’ve foreseen that such a battle cry would someday be meant for…
John Carter Vs. Tracey Lords
Yesterday I looked briefly at the mess Disney has made of marketing the $250,000+ John Carter, an epic based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ (Tarzan) classic Martian adventures. That got me looking back in the Nerdvana archives at a much-older post…
Why B Movies?
Often the term B movie is thought to be one of derision and scorn. Low budget B or Genre filmmaking are thought to be second class or in some way inferior. We at the B Movie Celebration know otherwise. We…
Joe Bob Briggs
Joe Bob Briggs hails from Grapevine, Texas. Somewhere along the way, he saw a LOT of drive-in movies and became an expert on this particular type of film. In fact, he began to write about the films he saw, starting…
Kevin Tenney’s :The Cellar
Comanche Indians have trapped the evil of their land in a monster made up of a mixture of other animals. The Comanche have placed a protective spear in the ground to contain the evil. A young boy pulls the spear…
Mediocre?
Slumped in your chair as life’s meaninglessness washed over you like lava made of Brad Pitt’s bubble gum, you may have zoned out for the most tattletale bit of Sunday night’s Oscars telecast. (If you just skipped the whole shebang,…
El Monstro del Mar!
THE FILM: When Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s GRINDHOUSE hit theaters a few years ago, it seemed like everyone was bandying about the term “grindhouse” for any film remotely exploitive or moderately budgeted. Many filmmakers began copying the scratched, jumpy…
Adios Gringo
The fourth Gemma western of 1965, and the fourth hit. Adios Gringo even beat the two Ringo movies at the box office, ending third on the list of most successful westerns of the year, behind For a Few Dollars More…
What does the Academy have against fantasy (and science fiction)?
“Hugo” continued its dominance in the technical categories at the 84th Academy Awards as Rob Legato, Joss Williams, Ben Grossmann, and Alex Henning won the Oscar for Visual Effects. The “Harry Potter” movies have earned billions of dollars and delighted…
Dr. Strangelove
Stanley Kubrick’s jet-black anti-nuke farce, from 1964, is being projected in the narrower screen format the writer-director intended—close to the shapes of old movies, TV tubes, and standard comic-book panels. It’s the perfect frame for Kubrick’s devastating deadpan burlesque of…
Parodies???
Vivid Entertainment contract director B. Skow has announced a slate of upcoming parodies in various stages of completion that will be released later this year. Skow just wrapped production of the adult comedy “ClerksXXX: A Porn Parody,” which spoofs the…
Why the Artist Is the Perfect Movie for These Times
I saw The Artist in The Paris Theater. For New Yorkers, The Paris Theater is iconic. It’s across the street from the Plaza Hotel and right next to Bergdorf Goodman, and it gets all the great and unusual movies, and…
J. Edgar Hoover and the Curse of the G-Man
So J. Edgar was stiffed when the Oscar nominations were announced. Obviously, there’s a conspiracy afoot! When I was growing up, the bulldog face of J. Edgar Hoover was as iconic as the presidential heads on Mt. Rushmore. He always…
Roger Corman: Hearts and Flowers on St. Valentine’s Day
It’s February 14, so of course I’m thinking of Roger Corman’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. It details what led up to the famous mob-land killing in which Al Capone’s boys wiped out a rival Chicago gang. The film was released…
Spielberg, A Nervous Wreck
Director Steven Spielberg, 65, more than anyone in the film industry, can afford to take risks on ideas, projects, fantasies. He seems to have carte blanche to turn whatever he touches into gold. His films include Jaws, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,…
Laura
After success in the American theatre, a few acting roles on the screen and a series of false starts as a movie director, Otto Preminger, the Austrian protege of Max Reinhardt, suddenly revealed himself as a master when he took…
Black Gold
Financed largely by Arab countries and shot on location in Tunisia and Qatar, Black Gold is an Arabian Nights fable about the settlement of a long rivalry between two emirs on the Arabian peninsula at some unspecified time in the…