Pity poor William Castle. One gets the feeling that the B-movie filmmaker spent his whole life trying to get out from the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. He never really did — with his most noteworthy film credit coming as a producer on Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” .<\/p>\n
Why: Ordinarily, I’m a little hesitant to recommend a movie that airs at such an odd hour, but some movies are more DVR-worthy than others, and this is one of them. Besides, it’s almost Halloween, and this one is just the right flavor. <\/p>\n
It’s a documentary that screened at the 2008 New Orleans Film Festival — and which took home the Best Documentary Feature Award in the process. Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, it tells the story of B-movie filmmaker William Castle, a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and P.T. Barnum whose 1950s and 1960s horror and suspense films were notable not so much for their on-screen brilliance but for the absolutely inspired gimmicks he dreamed up to set them off from other films. (Among them: installing joy buzzers in theater seats and setting them to go off during the climactic scene of 1959’s “The Tingler.”) <\/p>\n
Castle’s films weren’t great films, but they were memorable ones — as is “Spine Tingler,” which stands as a must-see for film geeks.