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.’…
Going Beyond B’s
Carrie and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn are horror classics, and it’s no surprise that the Terrace Theater would feature them on their monthly fright night lineup. But there’s more to the films than that. Both challenged the conventional…
Get The Gringo
And he will do just about anything to get it. As we all should know by now, the moment Gibbo’s private life went public, his career went kaput. The man is either too proud or too deluded to realise the…
Jacques Audiard praises B movies at Cannes
The French director has won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival and been nominated for an Academy Award, but he has a passion for the colorful cut-price end of the cinema market: horror films and thrillers, melodramas and westerns….
A PSYCHOTRONIC CHILDHOOD
Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in. I would prefer to have been a sickly child. I always love it when I read a biography of some key Modernist or…
Thirty-five years ago in movie theaters very, very close to home ….. ‘Star Wars’ was born
While May the Fourth (be with you … yeah, yeah, we get it) has come and gone, what might be the most important naturally occurring high holy day on the geek calendar happens this Friday – the 35th anniversary of…