Re-Making The Thing (Again)
One morning last week, while enjoying my coffee, I stumbled across that headline in Daily Variety. I nearly did one of those Danny Thomas spit-takes. For those not fluent in the rat-a-tat La-La-Land verse of Variety-speak, that announcement means that…
Meet Cleo Moore
“Beautiful, voluptuous Cleo Moore was one of Hollywood’s most publicized starlets during the 1950’s. Several publicity stunts landed the B movie queen on the from pages of newspapers across the country, notably her announcement that she would run for Governor…
Bela Lugosi
Bela Lugosi, born Bela Blasko on 20 October, 1882, in Lugos, Hungary, trained for the stage at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts. From 1901 he played lead parts on the Hungarian stage and from 1915 in films, sometimes using…
SuperTrash
SuperTrash,” a collection of B-movie posters on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, It’s a collection of pulp art film posters, with some being campy and funny, while many others are risqué and, well, trashy. Co-curator Jacques Boyreau,…
MOCKBUSTER Q&A – DAVID LATT
If you’re a fan of sci-fi movies like Mega Piranha, Transmorphers, Almighty Thor or Snakes on a Train, there’s every chance you’ve come across a movie from the creative minds at The Asylum. The Asylum was founded by former Village…
The Blob
The Blob is an independently made 1958 American horror/science-fiction film that depicts a giant amoeba-like alien that terrorizes the small community of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. In the style of American International Pictures, Paramount Pictures released the film as a double feature…
2012 The Year Of The Geek
There was a time when Hollywood was not solely in the business of making franchise films with a built-in geek fanbase. In the early ’90s, science-fiction films were mostly low-budget B-movies and Star Trek sequels. The success of Tim Burton’s…
Doctor Strange’ Moving Forward
It’s been months since we last heard about a possible ‘Doctor Strange’ movie and now it looks like it is actually moving forward towards getting made! The last news heard about the movie was that Thomas Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer…
2011 Movie Attendance And Revenues Drop Again
A year ago we said the 2010 box office news at the movies wasn’t good. Last year it was worse. Overall attendance in 2011 dropped to 1.28 billion in North America, down 4.6 percent from 2010 and the lowest since…
Mummified B Movie Actress
In the February 2012 issue of Los Angeles magazine writer Steve Mikulan reports on the unusual life and death of Yvette Vickers, the B-grade screen star whose mummified corpse was discovered in her Benedict Canyon home last year. Here he…
Chopping Mall (1986)
Rendering the rent-a-cop obsolete with the simple flick of a switch, the mildly satirical, yet altogether entertaining Chopping Mall presents an off-kilter world where your average shopping centre (Sherman Oaks Galleria) is crawling with killer robots, replete with waitresses in…
Steve Latshaw: Following Dreams
Steve Latshaw got an early start in the movie business. He was making headlines while still in high school by shooting comedy specials for the GE Cablevision channel. The 18-year-old was featured in a Daily Review article in 1977 after…
Why Samuel Fuller?
Many people will associate Samuel Fuller less for any of his films than for his “guest appearance” in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou in 1965. Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) runs into him at a Paris party and asks, “I’ve always…
The ‘B’ Stands For Beloved
Talk with Roger Corman for more than five minutes, and he comes across as a film historian. Look at his filmography and the list of disciples he brought into the industry, and it’s clear that he isn’t just a film…
Reagan: Errol Flynn of the B-movies
However one might judge his career as US President, the late Ronald Reagan played a leading role on the world’s stage.But in his pre-White House years as a Hollywood actor, he was forever waiting in the wings.He never won an…
George Mihalka
Your early producer Bob Presner told me that he met you after seeing a short film you did with your cinematographer Rodney Gibbons called Pizza to Go. That was our final student film, a 30-minute experimental satirical comedy based on…
Cars, karate and kangaroos!
Why!? What!? How!? Where!? For 100 astounding minutes the breakneck documentary Not Quite Hollywood mounts a staggering assault on your common sense. Tracing the rise and fall of Australian exploitation cinema from the early-70s to the late-80s, Mark Hartley’s breathless…
Oscar Micheaux
The fifth of eleven children, Oscar Micheaux’s grandparents and parents had been slaves. Micheaux worked in an auto factory, a coal mine, and as a porter, gradually saving enough from his meager wages to buy a small farmstead in virtually…
Attack Of The Octopus People
Seventeen-year-old Joshua Kennedy is already an accomplished actor, having starred in more than 100 films — never mind that most of those films were shorts broadcast only on YouTube. He set his goal a bit higher with his latest self-produced…
Movie Pioneers In Chicago
Before the movie industry moved west to Hollywood, it got its start here in Chicago during the silent film era. “The first movie industry was in Chicago,” said Geoffrey Baer of WTTW-Channel 11, an expert on Chicago and its history….