Son of Cronenberg
Imagine you are David Cronenberg, a filmmaker but also a parent. You tell your kids that your job is making movies; naturally, they want to see one. So which do you show them? “Scanners,” with its exploding heads? “Rabid,” where…
CD Review: SHE DEMONS / THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER
When you want the best in shrieking, old-school genre music, then Monstrous Movie Music has been the place for any Famous Monsters fan to geek out to, as the label has gone from sumptuous re-recordings of the likes of GORGO,…
B Movie Theatre: Alice In Slasherland
When Daniel Martin took his new position last January as artistic director for Birmingham’s Theatre Downtown, one of his first tasks was to figure out how to make an actor vomit up a demon on stage. It was for the…
GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS
everal Japanese merchant ships in the Pacific Ocean are mysteriously destroyed by a strange radioactive energy discharge that appears from beneath the water, killing most of the crew outright and causing the few survivors to later die of radiation sickness….
The Amazing Atomic Movie Monsters
Being as I was a child of the 1990s and having not even been alive in the 1950s I ended up missing out on the side of movies that helped to define the Sci Fi genre in the 1950s. Such…
Wild About Harry
With the passing of Ray Harryhausen on Tuesday, the film community lost a legend. The stop-motion guru whose pioneering techniques are still used today arguably contributed more to the advancement of special effects than anyone in the pre-digital age, setting…
The Hidden Face
Trailers revealing too much in general is nothing new, but some go one step further and divulge a plot point or character trajectory so fundamental to your enjoyment of the film that you’re robbed of all surprise and discovery. The…
Hell Comes To Frogtown
If this film’s title wasn’t enough of an indication for you – yes, Hell Comes to Frogtown is a cheese piece, a staple of the “so-bad-it’s-good” genre of action adventure films, and more to the point, it’s a 1980s film,…
Bloodfeast
Well, it’s been said that ‘Blood Feast’ was the first gore movie of all time. I’m not going to dispute that, as I haven’t seen any before its release date of 1963. What can not be disputed by anybody is…
The Giant Spider
When radiation left behind by atomic weapons testing creates a gigantic killer mutant arachnid, it’s up to a trio of scientists (Mike Cook, Billie Jo Konze and James Norgard), an Army general (Mark Haider), and a newspaper reporter (Daniel R….
Big Joe Lewis, B Movie Director
Tomorrow night, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films will screen the Joseph H. Lewis noir Gun Crazy, one of the major works of classic B cinema and one of the most radical and thoroughly entertaining movies in American film history,…
Music For Nuke ‘Em High Movie
A CROSS-dressing singer and music producer from Darwen has composed the soundtrack to a film premiered at Cannes. Kurt Walsh, 26, who grew up in Pole Lane, approached Troma Entertainment, the makers of cult 1986 B-movie ‘Nuke Em High’, after…
The Giant Behemoth
The Giant Behemoth was one of the last giant monster-on-the-loose films of the 1950’s, a decade that saw all manner of creatures born of the two biggest scientific issues of the decade- space exploration and nuclear weapons. Behemoth fell into…
The Trendsetting Doris Wishman
Doris Wishman was born on June 1, 1912, in New York City. She was still a child when her mother died. Her father was a hay and grain salesmen who raised her and her five other siblings. Wishman studied for…
Akira
‘Akira’ is an astonishingly influential film, easily as much so as cinema’s touchstones Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction. Its impact is made more difficult to judge, though, given that it was made more than sixteen years ago, and didn’t make…
Intro To Anime
The real history of the medium is frequently chaotic and bizarre (as is the medium itself), and to cover it in depth would take hundreds of pages (I’ve been threatening for years to write such a book), but that’s not…
Coffy
Pam Grier made many movies in the 1970s, but ‘Coffy’ as much as anything, is the one role on which her reputation as the Queen of blaxploitation rests. After a bit part in a Russ Meyer movie (his classic ‘Beyond…
Fast & Furious 6
There’s an amusing disclaimer in the credits for Fast & Furious 6, along the lines that the stunts in the film are dangerous and shouldn’t be tried at home. Even the most fanatical petrol-head might struggle to recreate the bit…
Shark Hunter
I really love bad movies. The lower the budget and more ridiculous premise the better. If you throw in some awful acting and bad special effects (and those are just a given) then you have the icing on a really…
Arnold In Toxie
What’s weirder, that the former Governor of California might appear in “The Toxic Avenger,” or that there’s a 21st Century remake of the freaky underground favorite in the works? The original “Toxic Avenger” was a low-budget, gross-out comedy about a…