Tag Archives: film

Horror Express, 1971

Christopher Lee.
Peter Cushing.
And… Telly Savalas?????
Yes, Telly Savalas. His role is more of a glorified cameo than a full part. It is, however, quite glorious.
Somewhere in remote China, around about 1910, Christopher Lee has dug up something that will set the scientific world back on its heels, a body that he thinks is a [...]

Creature from the Haunted Sea, 1963

This movie kicks ass.
Really, need anything more be said?
OK, I guess I could go on a bit.
Years ago, I had a religious experience when I read Roger Corman’s autobiography, How I Made 100 Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime. This movie gets heavy mention in it because a critic once [...]

The Invisible Ghost, 1941

In The Invisible Ghost1, there is nobody and nothing that is invisible, and no ghost, except perhaps in the loosest metaphoric sense.
For a Poverty Row horror flick, it’s pretty darned good, with actual effort from both cast and crew clearly evident in just about every scene. This does not make it an objectively good [...]

Black Dragons, 1942

First off, even though this is included in various Mill Creek Entertainment horror packs, it isn’t a horror movie. What it turns out to be is an eccentric spy thriller. But, of course, it stars Bela Lugosi, so it gets labeled as horror.
After Black Dragons opens on a dinner party involving a number [...]

The Man from Nowhere, 1966

The Man from Nowhere starts off with a prison break, which is pretty nifty. It’s a Mexican prison, seemingly, and a band of outlaws is taking as many men as they can away, to force them into the gang (replacing members that were killed).
One prisoner saunters out after the bandits have left except for [...]

Mesa of Lost Women, 1953

Oy. Wow. Yarg.
Or, in somewhat more enlightening terms: Mesa of Lost Women is disjointed, silly, and plodding.
Any comparisons to Ed Wood movies are apt and begged for, given that there’s patch-up narration1 by one of Ed Wood’s stock company, and annoying soundtrack music straight out of Jail Bait.
There is an insanely hot [...]

The Legend of Bigfoot, 1975

Recently there was another Bigfoot farce. The hoaxers held a press conference claiming they had a Bigfoot body1, but brought little to show — a couple blurry pictures, and DNA test results that led to some truly entertaining rationalizations.
I’ve always been fascinated by cryptozoology. When I was quite young, and gullible, I tended [...]

Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, 1950

I think I’m getting a little overdosed on Bud and Lou. The more I watch, the less I seem to have to say, despite this being one of the stronger entries in the collection I bought.
At the opening of Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, Bud is a wrestling manager in New York [...]

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948

Arguably, this is it — the very best Abbott and Costello movie there is. The boys are in top form, and they get to play off a scenario that is not, at least at the time of the making of this film, threadbare. They get an actual story, into which their antics fit [...]

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, 1951

Dang, this one was good.
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are graduating Detective School at the beginning of this one.1 They get hired by a private detective agency and work the night shift alone in the office. Their first night a man walks in with a case. He’s a boxer who’s been framed [...]

Lost in Alaska, 1952

Unlike Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, this is the bottom of the barrel as Abbott and Costello movies go. But the great thing is that with A&C there’s a baseline of quality to their work. However bad the script, low the budget, or awful the cast, Bud and Lou are pretty much [...]

Trip with the Teacher, 1975

Sleaze. Pure 1970s drive-in grindhouse sleaze.
And I enjoyed it, without even a slight inclination to shower afterward. Mostly because, while Trip with the Teacher certainly strives to be dark, it’s rather hard to take seriously.
The parents of four female students1 have convinced one of their teachers to take them on a learning vacation [...]

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, 1949

[Note: This is a rerun of a review first posted in October of 2003. I did indeed watch the movie again, but decided that what I said before stands unchanged. Links have been updated, a little light editing has occurred, but mostly this is what I wrote five years ago because this [...]

WALL-E, 2008

Nothing I’m going to write is going to make a bit of difference, you’re either going to see it or not.
Nevertheless, while I felt a bit conflicted, I adored it. It keeps up this week’s unintentional “charming” theme — Wall-E and Eve are two of the most charming characters I’ve seen in a movie [...]

Tomboy, 1985

Tomboy is, in its way, perfect. It’s not good. It’s intermittently entertaining in the usual sense. But it is perfectly what it sets out to be, and like The Pom Pom Girls, there isn’t a mean bone in its body.
This is the movie I referenced the other day as being precisely what [...]