Ravenous
Ravenous is a 1999 horror film directed by Antonia Bird and starring Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle and Jeffrey Jones. The film revolves around cannibalism in 1840s California and some elements bear similarities to the story of the Donner Party and…
Zombie Lake
Zombie Lake (or Zombies’ Lake), known in the original French as Le lac des morts vivants (English: “The Lake of the Living Dead”), is a 1981 zombie horror film directed by Jean Rollin (under the name J.A. Laser). The film…
Grindhouse Releasing
Grindhouse Releasing (also referred to as “Grindhouse”) is a Hollywood-based independent cult film distribution company co-founded by director/actor Sage Stallone and headed up by film editor Bob Murawski (who most often works with film director Sam Raimi). Grindhouse Releasing digitally…
Joseph Ruben , Director
Joseph Ruben has gained a reputation for his offbeat, psychological, and dark examinations of modern American family life. His 1987 film The Stepfather, which looks at an outwardly normal dad whose bland face masks the ruthless heart of a serial…
Crown International Pictures
Crown International Pictures is an independent film studio and distribution company formed in 1959 by Newton P. Jacobs Jacobs was a former branch head of RKO Pictures until 1947 when he formed his own company “Favorite Films”; a film releasing…
Jenny Agutter
The fame of the 1970 film of The Railway Children persists in the most surprising of quarters. Jenny Agutter was performing (with Daniel Radcliffe) in the West End in the Peter Shaffer play Equus a couple of years ago. “I…
L.Q. Jones
Tall, sandy haired, mustachioed actor from Texas born Justus McQueen, who adopted the name of the character he portrayed in his first film, Battle Cry (1955). Jones, with his craggy, gaunt looks, first appeared in minor character roles in plenty…
A Boy And His Dog
It’s the year 2024, and most of the Earth’s nations have been demolished by yet another world war (the latest being WWIV). In this postapocalyptic world, slow-witted survivor Vic (Don Johnson) forages through the ruins for food and women with…
Alexei Balabanov, Director
Iconic Russian film director Alexei Balabanov passed away on May 18, 2013. He is best known for his portrayal of Russia in the 1990s, particularly in his films Brother and Brother 2. Balabanov was born on Feb. 25, 1959 in…
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,…