100 Years Of Paramount
During its 100 years in the entertainment industry, Paramount has morphed from a New York City-based producer of silent films into a multibillion-dollar studio that could be considered the crown jewel of the Viacom media empire. In its birth year,…
The Zombie Shopping Mall Experience:
A few weeks ago we told you about the zombie shopping mall – a live action experience that puts you and your chums in the starring role of a George Romero-style horror movie. After days of frenzied retweeting, film quoting…
Bela Lugosi
Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, commonly known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian actor of stage and screen. He was best known for having played Count Dracula in the Broadway play and subsequent film version, as well as having starred in…
Got Them Studio Blues
At a convention of movie theater owners here on Tuesday, Walt Disney Studios displayed plenty of fanfare, trotting out Johnny Depp to promote his 2013 remake of “The Lone Ranger” and hiring 11 bagpipe players to herald “Brave,” a film…
Alien Opponent
Alien Opponent started as an original TV movie on the cable channel Chiller, which explains its comparable quality to that of a SyFy original one. The plot is simple enough, and coyly timed with the Hunger Games release: an alien…
The Raven Not Good
Edgar Allan Poe was not happy — of course, he was never happy. That’s what made him Poe. If Poe ever felt like whistling the tune to “Walkin’ on Sunshine,” he’d have to make sure no one was around. He…
Behind The Scenes Of Abraham Lincoln
It’s funny how things wind up in the zeitgeist and we end up with a bunch of gladiator movies, two asteroid films, two werewolf flicks, etc. A lot of times, it’s not because anyone’s trying to rip anybody off, although…
Dark Shadows
In a surprising move, Warner Bros. has released a slew of videos from the upcoming movie ‘Dark Shadows.’ With almost 10 minutes worth of clips from the movie, one would have to give second thoughts about the marketing strategy the…
Shocker Endings
The sci-fi thriller “Sound of My Voice,’’ starring Brit Marling as a mesmerizing cult leader, keeps its audience guessing as to her true intentions before wrapping up with an a-ha ending that could still be interpreted in a number of…
Zombies of Mass Destruction
An idyllic island town is under attack by that most invasive of pests: zombies! Port Gamble is being overrun with braineaters, and the people seem powerless to stave them off. But wait, a rag tag band of rebels is trying…
The Raven
“The Raven” is a movie that sounds great in theory: It’s a fictional thriller that uses Edgar Allen Poe as its central character. There’s a serial killer loose in 1849 Baltimore, and his grisly crimes seem to be inspired by…
The Cowboy Way
American kids growing up in the 1940s and ’50s spent a lot of Saturdays in movie theaters watching Westerns and serials. Nearly all of them acted out the scenes later when they played. But some kids were even luckier and…
SAFE
A slow-building B-movie thriller, “Safe” is nothing new for Jason Statham. A girl is in need of his protection from assorted gangs of bad men. But the dialogue crackles with flinty one-liners. “Don’t lose sleep. He had it coming,” he…
The Killers
This remake of the classic film with the same name (1946) by Robert Siodmak deals with two hired killers (Lee Marvin , Clu Gulager in similar role to William Conrad and Charles McGraw) who murder a man (John Cassavetes replacing…
Man Bait
Man Bait is an engrossing, low-budget British film noir that represents an early Hammer Films production in the years before the studio turned to producing their legendary line of horror movies. Several soon-to-be-big Hammer icons worked on the production: it…
The Phantom Passes
William Finley, a character actor who appeared in many films by Brian De Palma, most memorably as the title character in the 1974 rock opera “The Phantom of the Paradise,” died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived…
Tribute To Bruce Surtees
HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER 1973, Universal, 105 min, USA, Dir: Clint Eastwood Clint Eastwood directs himself as the hardboiled stranger hired by a town to protect it from outlaws – but this stranger may not be who he seems. As the…
Strippers Vs Werewolves
Director Jonathan Glendening of 13Hrs werewolf notoriety doesn’t move that far away from his furry feral fiends in his latest grizzly flick, Strippers Vs Werewolves. This exceptionally daft, tongue-in-cheek pastiche of the erotic slasher B-movie also taps into the comic-book…
Thou Shalt Not Kill… Except
from AV Club Quentin Tarantino wasn’t the first ambitious B-movie fanatic to turn a hobby into a career; he followed a trail blazed by the likes of Joe Dante, Sam Raimi, the Coen brothers, and others. Josh Becker and Scott…
Rodriguez Returns
You may recall when Robert Rodriquez first came on the scene with El Mariachi, a movie he allegedly made for $30,000. I loved his bigger budget version of the film, Desperado, and enjoy Rodriguez’s work when he’s on top…