Piranha 3DD
Piranha 3DD is a funny, energetic and unabashedly sleazy hymn to the three classic B movie virtues: blood, beasts and breasts. The beasts are prehistoric piranhas who’ve made their way via underground rivers to an adult-themed water park where the…
Big Fade Out On Drive Ins
Many midlifers have fond memories of snuggling on the bench seats of their cars while watching a Grade B movie at a drive-in. Originally marketed towards families, these iconic outdoor theaters became a big draw for teenagers in the 60s…
Zombies Vs Gladiators
Despite the fact that none of these movies that pit two famous movie creatures against each other and none of these B-movie tributes that present material that’s self-aware in its schlockiness have managed to become runaway hits, Hollywood has deemed…
Revisiting Alien
In space, no one can hear you scream. But in 1979, audiences at Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking, science-fiction-horror-hybrid “Alien” there were shrieks aplenty. While Scott’s hotly anticipated “Alien” follow-up “Prometheus” has been described as everything from an “Alien” prequel to a…
Sybil Danning
Danning was born in Wels, Upper Austria, Austria as Sybille Johanna Danninger. Danning was the love child of a German-Dutch-American father, who had to leave for the United States before Danning’s birth. Her Austrian mother raised her until she married…
Hardbodies
Hardbodies is a 1984 sex comedy film about three middle-aged men who hire a younger man to help them pick up women at the beach. The film was directed by Mark Griffiths, and stars Grant Cramer, Courtney Gains, and Gary…
Theatre Stocks Booming
The likes of NetFlix, HBOGo, VideoOnDemand and free and easy downloading of content from the Internetwere all supposed to spell doom for the brick and mortarMovie Theater, right? Not so fast. The performance of the movie industry this year indicates…
Danny DeVito On Scary Movies
Danny DeVito’s older sisters forced him to watch horror movies when he was a child. The American star can vividly recall being petrified when he attended the cinema with his siblings. He used to crouch down so he couldn’t see…
Terror In A Texas Town
Over the weekend, the programmers at Northwest Chicago Film Society announced that they replaced Wednesday night’s 7:30 PM screening of The Halliday Brand with another western from director Joseph H. Lewis, Terror in a Texas Town. It’s one of the…
Fred Ward
A marvelous character actor with intense eyes, a sly grin and somewhat grizzled appearance, Fred Ward has nearly 70 appearances under his belt in many tremendous films. He first became interested in acting after serving three years in the US…
Battle Beyond The Stars
While “Star Wars” might have been a subtle adaptation of “Seven Samurai” (read the note below before writing me), this makes no attempt to hide its pedigree. In the original we know why the bandits were demanding a huge portion…
The Last Action Hero
Jason Statham’s greatness announced itself early in his acting career—88 seconds into his motion picture debut, to be precise, in the opening sequence of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Statham plays Bacon, a small-time criminal peddling stolen merchandise…
Piranha 2:The Spawning
James Cameron may be credited as the director of Piranha II: The Spawning, but given his own rocky participation in the project—his Italian producers removed him from viewing or editing the footage he shot, and thus he had little to…
Frankenweenie Poster Pulled
Disney has pulled back the sheet on a new poster for Tim Burton’s stop-motion-animated Frankenweenie, the story of a boy who uses mad science to resurrect his beloved deceased pet. That central story obviously is a spin on Mary Shelley’s…
Alamo and The Electric Boogaloo
Drafthouse Films, the distribution arm of the world-famous Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, announced today the acquisition of all US rights to ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS from world-wide sales agent Celluloid Nightmares. From acclaimed cult film documentarian…
B Memories
I saw something of my own childhood, albeit at a decade’s remove, in Colson Whitehead’s memoir of growing up in the seventies with low-budget, low-esteem science-fiction movies. He writes, “If I was lucky, I’d come home from elementary school to…
Jersey Shore Shark Attack
It’s one thing for Gov. Chris Christie to urge people to “get the hell off the beach.” It’s another for Paulie Walnuts of “The Sopranos” to shout into a megaphone for everyone to flee the Jersey Shore before they’re eaten….
Piranha 3DD
It’s a sink or swim moment for the filmmakers behind the sequel to “Piranha 3D.” Combining a silly, self-aware sensibility with over-the-top gore, the original comedic horror film starring the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Christopher Lloyd and Elizabeth Shue as…
Prometheus
‘Big things have small beginnings,” says Michael Fassbender’s Peter O’Toole-mimicking android at one point in Prometheus. It’s a wry observation on the way a single drop of blood is used to create much of the havoc that proceeds in Ridley…
I Killed Adolf Hitler
Iron Sky’ is certainly a divisive little film — what with its B-movie plot about Nazis on the moon and all — and director Timo Vuorensola is already working on his follow-up, another Nazi-themed film titled ‘I Killed Adolf Hitler.’…