Check Out the Trailer

In Hollywood, all successful genre films get a sequel. I wasn’t very impressed with the first RING, so you can imagine what I was thinking going into the second one.

The hero of the original film Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts, KING KONG) and her son Aidan (David Dorfman, PANIC) have moved away to start a new life away from the curse of the evil videotape. However, as we see in the first sequence, the tape has found its way to their new sleepy town. However, this time around the ghost Samara (Kelly Stables, THE HAUNTED MANSION) isn’t as interested in killing the people who watch the videotape, but now wants to possess Aidan and have Rachel as her new mommy. Now Rachel must unravel the mystery once again, finding the solution that eluded her in the first film.

Read the rest of this entry »

George Bernard Shaw’s classic play has been remade or outright stolen since the dawn of cinema. Every teen makeover movie owes its origins to PYGMALION. Most people are introduced to the story via the musical MY FAIR LADY. Though versions came before and many have come after, Leslie Howard’s version is universally considered the best.

Truly the adaptation is quick, smart and never stagy. If you have lived in Paris Hilton land your whole life and don’t know the story I’ll briefly outline it. Prof. Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard, GONE WITH THE WIND) is a top linguist who takes a bet with Col. George Pickering (Scott Sunderland, 1939’s GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS) that he can pass a cockney “guttersnipe” off as a princess by transforming her speech and manner. His test subject is the flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS), who meets him on the street one night and visits his house the next day asking to have speech lessons so that she can get a proper job at a flower shop.

Read the rest of this entry »

James Whale was a director who was always assigned to direct horror films, which he infused with his own sense of campy humor. This is probably the funniest of all of Whale’s films that I have seen thus far.

Lazy playboy Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas, NINOTCHKA) is driving through the English countryside with his bickering friends Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey, ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS & Gloria Stuart, 1997’s TITANIC). It’s pouring outside, which causes a landslide. To get out of the weather, they arrive at an old dark house where the sibling owners, Horace and Rebecca Femm (Ernest Thesiger, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN & Eva Moore, 1946’s OF HUMAN BONDAGE), allow them to stay the night. The Femms have a hulking and scary looking butler named Morgan (Boris Karloff, FRANKENSTEIN) — think hairy Lurch. Rebecca keeps yammering on about the evils of the family and the cursed house, scarring the wits out of Margaret.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check Out the Trailer

Based on the German play, THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE, director Peter Brook (1963’s LORD OF THE FLIES) took it from the London stage to the screen using actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The story is set in one room where as the full title states the inmates of the Charenton asylum perform a play directed by the Marquis De Sade.

It is true that De Sade wrote and performed his own plays while in the asylum, which was under the direction of Monsieur Coulmier, who believed that art had a healing effect on the insane. For the film, the actors play inmates playing the roles in the play while a silhouetted audience watch the production from the other side of a set of bars.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check Out the Trailer

M*A*S*H is a comedy like no other. I come to this with some baggage. I grew up watching the TV series, which is a far more typical sitcom than this film. The film is far darker. My first viewing came when I was a holier than thou college student with a PC chip on my shoulder. I hated the film. With a few more years under my belt, I still find the film cruel and juvenile at times, but it’s honest and that’s what makes it so good.

Set during the Korean War, the film takes place at a front line surgical unit where the doctors and nurses engage in any vice they can think of to ease the pain of the horrible reality of war. Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland, KLUTE) and Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould, THE LONG GOODBYE) are new doctors to the M*A*S*H unit and swoop in like a whirlwind. Along with martini-loving Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT), the duo is there to do their job, which is to save lives to the best of their ability, whether it be on the surgery table to by drugging a Korean 17-year-old so that he won’t be drafted into the army.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check Out the Trailer

Released in Britain in 1943, this film was banned by Prime Minister Winston Churchill for foreign distribution until 1945. Unlike many of the war films of WWII, the picture isn’t blatantly patriotic, centering its attention on a bloated, walrus-mustached “Colonel Blimp” character, who some feel Churchill felt was a satire of himself.

The title may seem like an enigma for those not familiar with who Colonel Blimp was. He was cartoon character created by David Low, who was a fat, pompous, irascible, jingoistic and stereotypically English soldier. The directing, writing and producing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (THE RED SHOES, BLACK NARCICUSS) take this archetypical character and use it as a launching point to tell the story of a career soldier who desperately tries to hold on to his usefulness as he grows older. The 40-year time frame and the “downfall” of the main character in many ways reminded me of CITIZEN KANE. In quality, it deserves to be mentioned in the ranks of KANE as well. Yep, it’s that good.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check Out the Trailer

William Castle is kind of the P.T. Barnum of B-movies. For his film THE TINGLER, buzzers were installed in theaters to give tiny shocks to audiences members, sending them leaping from their seats. He is best known for his horror films, but he also made Westerns and sci-fi pictures.

Frederick Loren (Vincent Price, HOUSE OF WAX) is a millionaire who invites five strangers to his creepy estate for a ghost party. He will pay the guests $10,000 each if they are able to stay the night. However, it is rumored that seven people have died in the house and their ghosts still remain. The guests include: young typist Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig, GIANT), astronaut Lance Schroeder (Richard Long, TV’s TWILIGHT ZONE), paranoid ghost believer Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr., THE KILLING), skeptical psychiatrist Dr. David Trent (Alan Marshal, TOM, DICK & HARRY) and socialite newspaper reporter Ruth Bridgers (Julie Mitchum, 1956’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS).

Read the rest of this entry »

Check Out the Trailer

Starting in the 1950s, Roger Corman began his long and notorious career of directing and mainly producing low-budget horror and actions films. He helped launch the careers of such directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard as well as actors like Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. His 1960 version of Edgar Allan Poe’s THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER is a Technicolor gothic, starring Vincent Price. Fans of the film have lifted it up so high that it has been included in the U.S. Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.

The story begins with Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon, THE LONGEST DAY) riding to the Usher estate to see his fiancée Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey, TV’s ZORRO [1958]), who he meet while she was visiting Boston. However, the butler Bristol (Harry Ellerbe, TV’s RAWHIDE) tells Philip that Madeline is sick and that her brother Roderick (Price) is refusing guests. After Philip insists, Roderick meets with Philip and tells him that the Usher family is cursed. As Philip tries to take his beloved away, her brother does everything to keep her confined in the crumbling house. The family’s past haunts Roderick to a morbid degree.

Read the rest of this entry »

Playing almost like an experimental film, this chaotic movie from Brian DePalma (DRESSED TO KILL) has too much going for it to be ignored, but not enough to be revered.

Jon Rubin (Robert DeNiro, who is actually reprising his role from DePalma’s GREETINGS) has returned from Vietnam and hooks up with a porn producer to film peeping tom films of himself seducing a women named Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt, SISTERS), who lives in the housing project across from his apartment. As Jon films the tenants across the street, we peek into various lives — a family whose mother has bought a new film camera, a gigolo who has a new woman every night, an avant garde artist who paints his subjects black and Judy who sadly watches as her roommates go out on dates with their boyfriends night after night as she stays home watching TV.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check Out the Trailer

Romantic comedy-wise this is the best there has ever been. Billy Wilder (SABRINA) wrote and directed this Oscar winner, which tells the tale of two people who get took and in the process find love.

C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon, SOME LIKE IT HOT) is a low-ranking automaton at a huge insurance company in New York City. Through happenstance, his apartment has become the secret rendezvous for execs at his firm to take their mistresses, which often leaves him at work late or worse, sleeping in the park. He puts up with it, because these are powerful men, who can get him out of his little desk in a sea of little desks.

Read the rest of this entry »