Five Quick Questions with Gabriel Campisi
Creative, reliable, reputable, ambitious, and easy to work with are just a few qualities describing Gabriel Campisi. He began filmmaking at eight and was winning awards at festivals and contests as early as fifteen. Gabriel recently wrote the book “The…
Animation Legend Arthur Rankin Jr. Dies at 89
With fellow producer-director Jules Bass, he was behind the holiday TV specials – and perennial ratings hits – “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman.” Arthur Rankin Jr., the animator, producer and director behind the whimsical holiday stop-motion TV…
Ebola Zombies
The American Film Market (AFM) is now over, and as always, there are a couple of standout titles that are selling on just that premise alone. One of the movies is a timely new horror thriller called Ebola Zombies, which…
Andromeda Strain
When virtually all of the residents of Piedmont, New Mexico, are found dead after the return to Earth of a space satellite, the head of the US Air Force’s Project Scoop declares an emergency. Many years prior to this incident,…
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
Forbin is the designer of an incredibly sophisticated computer that will run all of America’s nuclear defenses. Shortly after being turned on, it detects the existence of Guardian, the Soviet counterpart, previously unknown to US Planners. Both computers insist that…
Demon Seed (1977)
Dean Koontz is a novelist well known for pushing the boundaries and delivering something a little different to what has gone before – and his novel of the same title that Demon Seed was based on is certainly that! However,…
Phase IV (1974)
Phase IV is not your average movie experience. Definitely not for everyone, so, see it if you get the chance (Last I saw it was a 1997 airing on The Sci-Fi Channel.) and decide if it’s for you. It’s even…
Tanya’s Island (1980)
Depending on your point of view this movie is either an interesting Freudian exploration of the “beauty and the beast” myth, or it is a particularly pretentious example of what Robin Bougie of “Cinema Sewer” magazine hilariously dubbed the “bigfoot-rape”…
Three on a Meathook (1973)
This is a gritty, low-budget exploitation movie with a 70’s feel. You will notice similarities to Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and supposedly it is inspired by the same true-life serial killer. It has some gore and nudity, and quite…
The Barbarians (1987)
The young orphans Kutchek and Gore have been adopted by a tribe of clowns, mentally challenged dolphins, juggling monkeys, a transvestite magician and other forgettable entertainers. The tribe is led by the queen Canary (not an actually Canary but a…
Abby (1974)
ABBY DOESN’T NEED A MAN — THE DEVIL IS HER LOVER NOW!! This very rare film which I was lucky enough to see the one week it played here in downtown Los Angeles during the Seventies (the prints were destroyed…
Uptown Saturday Night (1974)
Steve Jackson and Wardell Franklin sneak out of their houses to visit Madame Zenobia’s: a high-class but illegal nightclub. During their visit, however, the place is robbed and they are forced to hand over their wallets. Steve’s wallet turns out…
Three Days to a Kill (1992)
This HBO made for television feature film has the distinction of being having the farewell performances of both Chuck Connors and Van Johnson albeit in feature roles. Three Days To A Kill is a rather mindless action flick where a…
The Raiders of Atlantis
A team of scientists working to raise a sunken Russian nuclear submarine on an ocean platform off the coast of Miami, Florida, unearth an ancient Atlantean relic from the sea floor and bring in an expert to make some sense…
William Girdler
Born October 22, 1947 in Jefferson County, Kentucky, William Brent Girdler launched his filmmaking career with the 1972 release of Asylum of Satan. He made a total of nine films in six years and provided the music for the Pat…
Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976)
Fred and Tony are members of an elite ‘special squad’ of police in Rome, Italy whom are licensed-to-kill, undercover cops whom thrive on living dangerously. Despite its almost cartoonish violence, Ruggero Deodato really kept pushing boundaries for extreme violence and…
Warriors of the Wasteland (1983)
Pulling cinematic threads together I Nuovi Barbari saw a second life when it’s model city sets were reused in Lucio Fulci’s Guerrieri dell’anno 2072 (The New Gladiators). I could be wrong and an Italian man could have gleaned a lot…
Maximum Force (1992)
“Trouble and me are old friends…” “Maximum Force” is an enjoyable 90s direct to video blow ’em up from PM entertainment. Max Tanabe (as portrayed by the non-Japanese Lynch) is an unscrupulous crime lord who operates out of a high…
Jungle Holocaust (1977)
Congratulations, Mr. Deodato, you’ve done it again for the first time. As weird as that sounds, it’s true. Though Umberto Lenzi technically started the cannibal genre with the classic The Man from the Deep River, it was Deodato with Last…
Action Jackson (1988)
I did a quick search on the internet to see if my memory served me right, and apparently it has. By 1981, the Blaxploitation action film was exhausted. – Although Fred Williamson had made a couple of action films in…