Chucky’s Redux
We’re spent a lot of time talking about Child’s Play at CraveOnline. Witney Seibold spent weeks pouring over every film in the implausibly popular homicidal doll series over at The Series Project. Now it looks like he’ll have to gear…
Internet chatter
Internet chatter can explain movie blockbusters and even predict elections By Dennis Normile and ScienceNOW, Published: June 25 Why did “Marvel’s The Avengers” blow the roof off the box office, while “Battleship” sank? Blame Internet chatter. The number of times…
Drive-In In Peril
On a typical weekend night in the summer, the line of cars waiting to enter the Bengies Drive-In Theatre backs onto Eastern Boulevard, patrons hit up the snack bar and, as dusk turns to dark, owner D. Edward Vogel reels…
Jaws: The shark that changed everything
“It’s all psychological,” says Mayor Vaughn in Jaws, “You yell ‘barracuda,’ everybody says, ‘Huh? What?’ – you yell ‘shark,’ we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.” Panic on the Fourth of July has become commonplace…
B Movie Thrills
With its own punch line making up the composition of its very title, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” makes no pretentions of even trying to be anything more than a schlocky B-movie. The success of such films however, rides on the…
Sheen in Machete Kills
Like father, like son. Charlie Sheen could follow pops Martin into the White House in an upcoming big screen role as the president in director Robert Rodriguez’s sequel to his “Grindhouse” action pic, “Machete.” Rodriguez announced the casting on Thursday…
A Hobbit Mockbuster
A B-grade movie about hobbits is set to begin shooting in July — and could be out on DVD before Peter Jackson’s much-anticipated version debuts in December. The LA Times reported a production house called The Asylum was shooting the…
Arachnoquake
After watching this movie and the previous two films of Syfy’s “Most Dangerous Month on Television,” it seems that for this “set” of movies at least the SyFy channel has embraced and somewhat reinvented with a modern flare the Saturday…
Secretly Brilliant Abe
Critics are great. Without them, there would be no general consensus on the merit of a film. Who knows how many people would have seen Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star if it weren’t for the onslaught of negative…
Seedy Backdrop Of B’s
Check out this particularly lazy bit of stage management from 1955 b-movie extraordinaire ‘The Creature With The Atomic Brain‘. When b-movie journeyman, and certifued Deadly Movies Icon, Richard Denning comes home to the little wife (slapping her ass on the…
Starship Invasions
Made in the late 1970s, Starship Invasions was a fairly blatant attempt to capitalize on the resurgence of interest in sci-fi spearheaded by Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This obviously low-budget attempt may have unconvincing sets…
Lionel Shenken
For a short time in the 1980s, Emmeritus was CanCult’s king—not in quality, but in sheer quantity. Like Meridian, Cinpix, and Quadrant before it, the largely invisible Hamilton-based Emmeritus Productions was a resolutely independent venture dedicated to crafting unique genre…
Horrified B-Movie Victims
If you love monster movies, you will love the Horrified B-Movie Victims Play Set. Don’t you love those old time monster films with that bloated blob oozing after that scream queen? Well, now you can re-enact your favorite scenes anywhere,…
Western Costume
Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Russell Crowe made an appearance at Wednesday night’s Western Costume Company: The First 100 Years celebration, held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. So did Douglas Fairbanks, Vivienne Leigh, Clark Cable, George C….
Abraham Lincoln: Ashamed of this movie
Well, at least nobody’s going to wander into “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” wondering what they’re getting into. Really, too many movies hide behind meaningless come-ons. Who, exactly, are these “People Like Us”? What is “The Magic of Belle Isle”? You…
Enzo G. Castellari
Enzo G. Castellari (born July 29, 1938) is an Italian film director. He became famous during the 1960s by directing several spaghetti westerns with such titles as Go Kill and Come Back (Vado… l’ammazzo e torno, 1967), One Dollar Too…
Good Times Bad Times
The “B” in the term, B-movie does not stand for “bad.” But it could. B-movies were a by-product of the block booking system, when Hollywood required theaters to purchase a secondary feature if those theaters wanted to present the A-movie….
Truth Behind Abraham Lincoln
When faced with a tone-deaf would-be fanboy film, it’s hard not to think about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The woman who popularized the “five stages of dying” was also right on the money in describing all that went through my mind during…
Richard Lynch, B-Movie Veteran
Richard Lynch, an actor who needs no introduction to those who grew up watching B-movies in the 80′s, passed away on Tuesday at his home in Palm Springs, California. Specific details surrounding his death have not been released. He was…
SYFY: Fun and Fear
Toss pop-culture mainstays like Danny Bonaduce, Edward Furlong and Joey Fatone into a vat loaded with giant spiders, Bigfoot, killer sharks and a piranha-anaconda hybrid. The result: the summer batch of Syfy channel Saturday Original Movies packed with blood, guts,…