The Colony
We’re all doomed. From the various ways the world will end to the horrors any survivors have to suffer through just to see another day, our fiction is filled with apocalypses and their after-effects, of man showing his nobility via…
Pickup on South Street
4 January 1999 In this excellent Twentieth-Century Fox film-noir, the metropolis is a labyrinth of despair in which scavengers and predators survive by living off one another. Brooding cityscapes lower over puny humanity in bleak expressionist symbolism. A prostitute has…
Escape From Zahrain
A minor but reasonably entertaining action-thriller, Escape from Zahrain (1962) is a quirky little picture. Its small cast is a strange mix of actors while its screenplay is unusually unambitious for producer-director Ronald Neame, who had just made two outstanding…
How Italy saved the western with A Fistful of Dollars
A half-century ago in Rome, a camera technician named Enzo Barboni walked out of a movie theatre. He’d just seen Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, about an amoral samurai who manipulates two warring merchant factions in a small village, and he liked…
Quentin Tarantino May Play Roger Corman In New Biopic
There are few Hollywood legends as beloved and bizarre as B-movie kingpin Roger Corman. He’s a director and producer who, through his various entities, was responsible for releasing foreign movies into art houses (things by Godard and Kurosawa). He also…
ANNOUNCING THE SCHEDULE FOR THE 2013 B MOVIE CELEBRATION
Announcing the film schedule for The 2103 B Movie Celebration-Thanks Avery… FRIDAY October 25th. – 6:00 p.m. OPENING GALA – 7:00 p.m. THEATRE ONE – Short Film: “C.” [C 299,792 km/s]. [ 15 min. / U.S.A. ] Feature Film: Retro…
The Giant Behemoth
Behemoth, the Sea Monster (1959) is an American-British science-fiction film co-production. Originally a story about an amorphous blob of radiation, the script was changed at the distributor’s insistence to a pastiche of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), though elements…
When The B Is Better Than The A
Two contrasting action movies – Riddick and White House Down – are not only examples of how less can be more, and vice versa, but how a B-movie done well can be better than an A-movie blockbuster done badly. B-movie…
The B Movie Diet
How is being a director like going on a diet? Both of them require commitment, cause lots of stress, and can result in dramatic weight loss. While chatting about his happiest movie memories, “Rush” director Ron Howard revealed the experience…
A Single Shot
Sam Rockwell is one talented, free-spirited dude, with one of the longest lists of bad movies no single actor deserves. Even in a dog like Seven Psychopaths, he managed to be nothing less than watchable. Unfortunately, hiding his face behind…
Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses
Chris Nashawaty’s wonderful new book Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses is an homage to the “King of the B Movie”: Roger Corman, whose cheapo productions for American International Pictures and his own New World outfit, aimed squarely…
Great Horror Sequels
“Insidious: Chapter 2” is surprisingly a really good horror sequel that manages to not only live up to its predecessor, but exceed it. It’s no secret that most horror sequels are just cheap low budget thrills meant to make a…
A Brief History of B’s
Roger Corman is, was, and will always be the King of that too-often-dismissed, taboo genre. Now 87, the legendary director and producer has been toiling in the drive-in trenches for nearly 60 years. During his career he’s overseen 400 movies–and…
Night of the Comet
Trapped in a hellish copyright limbo for over a decade, Thom Eberhardt’s “Night Of The Comet” is a film whose reputation is due for a serious rehabilitation. Generally–and wrongly–categorized with typical 80s teen horror films, “Comet” is in fact a…
Targets
Tight, suspenseful, full of cross-cutting scenes to follow the unfolding of two stories that are about to merge into one, TARGETS is the last major feature film that BORIS KARLOFF made, and it’s one of his best during the latter…
Why Not A B Movie
The weekend has rolled in, and you and your friends are in the mood for a dorm movie night. You pull out a list of movies, or to be more precise, A-list movies. Is it because you prefer familiarity over…
Shock Con Here We Come
Horror, science fiction and fantasy invade Charleston, Sept. 20-22, as the Shocka-Con Horror/Sci-Fi Convention, comes to the Kanawha Players Theatre, 426 Beauregard Street, Charleston, WV. Tickets range from $10 to $100. Guest include Ray Wooley and RJ Haddy (o SyFy…
Insidious: Chapter 2
When we last left the Lamberts, the family whose eldest son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) had been trapped in a comalike state in “Insidious,” the boy had awakened from his supernatural trance thanks to a rescue mission by his intrepid father….
A bit of B-movie heaven
While some may say that Will Smith and Tom Cruise are the biggest movie stars in the world, I’d make a case that Vin Diesel is right on their heels. As proof, I submit his latest action epic Riddick, a…
Gremlins Director Joe Dante Takes on Roger Corman Biopic
Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers) will direct The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes, the upcoming biopic about producer and B-movie legend Roger Corman. Presented as a comedy, the film takes place in Hollywood in the late 1960s, reports ScreenDaily. Corman —…