Gremlins 2
People didn’t get Gremlins 2: The New Batch when it was released in the summer of 1990, six years and a week after its blockbusting predecessor. It grossed less than a third of the original’s box-office take ($41.4 million versus…
Retro Everyone Should See
The greatest science fiction movies don’t just have cool ideas or an unforgettable story — they also have a distinctive visual style. And a lot of our favorite films reach back into the past, for retro visions of the future…
Stealing Las Vegas
It’s pretty unlikely for a filmmaker to get his big break after spending more than 20 years as a university professor, but that’s exactly what happened to Francisco Menendez. The head of UNLV’s film department, Menendez showed his independent feature…
The King
Hollywood is a weird dream that Roger Corman dreamed once upon a time. In 1955, with a degree in industrial engineering and no movie background whatsoever, he directed his first film, Swamp Women. It was a terrible film. Like most…
Tokapi
So D.B. Cooper is back in the news. Forty years ago, a well-dressed man hijacked a Boeing 727, extorted $200, 000 in ransom money, then parachuted into uncharted terrain, never to be seen again. Last week’s newspapers contained fresh speculation…
How A Monkey Saved Fox
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is here. Its arrival marks yet one more opportunity for Twentieth Century Fox to cash in on a series that’s been a bonanza since 1968. In that year the original Planet of the…
Screaming All The Way To The Bank
Devoted reader Craig Edwards has requested the story of how schlockmeister Jim Wynorski (whose next low-budget release is Gila!, about the attack of a giant lizard) got his start in Hollywood. So I’ve cribbed from my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires,…
No Texting In Movies
Yes, I admit I’m old-fashioned. I’m just back from a writers’ conference hosted by the American Society of Journalists and Authors. There I discovered it’s considered cool to share the insights you’re gleaning by tweeting them to your thousands of…
Film Noir Festival
Last week, I dined at Musso’s with a tall, dark stranger. If that couldn’t get me in the mood for a Film Noir festival, nothing would. Musso and Frank Grill, a mainstay on Hollywood Boulevard since 1919, is dark, wood-paneled,…
Maniac Cop
Innocent people are brutally killed on the streets of New York by a uniformed police officer. A young cop, Jack Forrest (Bruce Campbell, TV’s BURN NOTICE and the EVIL DEAD trilogy), finds himself marked as the chief suspect after his…
Visiting Hours
Visiting Hours came completely out of nowhere. There’s not much info out there about this Canadian slasher, which actually helped create a sense mystery and terror to the narrative. The movie starts off not unlike The Howling, with a journalist…
Classic Vampires
The theme of the vampire is very popular for decades and is refreshed regularly or reinterpreted. With his latest album Dark Shadows also joins cult director Tim Burton in the ranks of the vampire film with one. In order to…
Dragon Wasps
Typically wasps are known for their stingers. Stingers look to be the least of your worries here what with these dragon wasps earning their namesake with their ability to project fire like flying flamethrowers. Mr. Syfy Corin Nemec stars in…
Ghost Rider
Ghost Rider, a character invented in the early 1970s, is, I think we can all agree, really cool-looking, but that’s about where the logic of his invention ends. Why not have a leather-clad biker, with a flaming skull for a…
Hollywood Loves Comics
The highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar, has started to make its way through the cable television universe. I saw a few minutes of it this week on FX, and was surprised by how different the film seemed than when…
Juan Of The Dead
If nothing else, Juan of the Dead is a film you can have some fun with. Unfortunately, it fails in nearly every other respect, but even then there’s no getting around the fact that this Cuban horror film has enough…
640 Million Avengers
Now the fun begins. The Avengers has broken box office records in its opening weekend, taking in more than half a billion and counting. But now that the fan boys and girls have flocked to the theatres, and the hype…
B Movie Attack
If you’ve watched any local TV or listened to any radio in the last two years – you should know Berne Velasquez. He’s a tireless self-promoter – and now he’s been able to parlay his local celebrity into his.. It’s…
100 Years Of Universal
Universal recently hit its 100 year anniversary. At first, the studio was most famously the house of horror, home to genre favorites like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf-Man, and the Creature From the Black Lagoon. Although Universal put out a lot…
Livid
Wetting our appetites, short film, Decapode Shock, acts as the perfect accompaniment to Bustillo and Maury’s genre-defying “horror” film, Livid. From a surreal part-animated sci-fi revenge tale with a horse-riding half-man half-crab wearing a spacesuit, Livid misleadingly takes us into…