The Vanishing (1993) + Hardcore (1979) – DVDs

September 6, 2004Posted in1970s, 1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

THE VANISHING
**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Todd Graff, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

HARDCORE
***/**** Image A- Sound B
starring George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Season Hubley, Ilah Davis
written and directed by Paul Schrader

by Bill Chambers 1993 was the year that American remakes of two estimable foreign thrillers became instant poster boys for Hollywood condescension. While John Badham's Point of No Return is every bit as egregious as they said it was (although I prefer its "Cleaner" sequence with Harvey Keitel to Nikita's field test of Jean Reno's Léon persona), George Sluizer's The Vanishing, an Americanization of his own Spoorloos, often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its forerunner–or is at the very least too provocative in its departures to dismiss out of hand. A lot of people wondered how Sluizer could desecrate what had been the crowning achievement of his career in this way, but what artist wouldn't jump at the chance to view a piece of work through the looking glass without physically altering the original? (A kindred impulse drives novelists to sell the screen rights to their books.) All I can say is that the end result is more seductive than, say, Vanilla Sky, or Christopher Nolan's Insomnia.

Wizards (1977) – DVD

August 4, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
written and directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I like Ralph Bakshi movies. I wish I didn’t, because they’re shrill and vulgar and slightly immature, and not even examples of brilliant cartooning. But they’ve got a working-class desperation to them that most American movies are too posh and moneyed to accurately capture. Hollywood filmmakers typically see poverty as an occasion for condescension from above; Bakshi sees it at ground level–consider the generations of failure that littered American Pop, or the chaotic skid-row scramble that defined Heavy Traffic. Thus I find myself in the unenviable position of guardedly praising his 1977 Wizards, which in the hands of any other director would have been merely a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff. This is not to say that it isn’t a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff, but it’s one with moments that resonate beyond simplistic sex and violence and wipe the goofy grin off of the normally flighty and gossamer-draped genre.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973) – DVD

June 23, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Italy, UK, War

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Graham Faulkner, Judi Bowker, Alec Guinness, Leigh Lawson
screenplay by Susio Cecchi D'Amico, Kenneth Ross, Lina Wertmüller, Franco Zeffirell
directed by Franco Zeffirelli

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover So: how do you get the young people back into church when they'd rather be out running wild and getting it on? If you're Mel Gibson, you break out the whips and chains and pour on the gore (an effective approach, to be sure), but if you're Franco Zeffirelli, you choose another path. You'll recall that Zeffirelli was the chap who brought kids back to Shakespeare by turning Romeo and Juliet into a make-out movie, scoring a few Oscar nominations in the bargain–but you can make certain sexy allowances for Shakespeare that you can't with the word of God. Against all odds, the man managed to make a religious tract in tune with the hormonal post-hippie youth of 1973 called Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which cleverly addresses the tender feelings of burgeoning bodies while glorifying a chaste life in the service of the Lord. Like Romeo and Juliet, though it's ludicrous in the extreme, its combination of low cunning and gawky earnestness makes it fascinating as a curio, if not as a fully functioning film on its own.

Bandolero! (1968); Myra Breckinridge (1970); Mother, Jugs & Speed (1975); One Million Years B.C. (1966) – DVDs

June 20, 2004Posted in1960s, 1970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Fantasy, Romance, UK, Western

BANDOLERO!
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring James Stewart, Dean Martin, Raquel Welch, George Kennedy
screenplay by James Lee Barrett
directed by Andrew V. Mc Laglen

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE
**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Mae West, John Huston, Raquel Welch, Rex Reed
screenplay by Michael Sarne and David Giler
directed by Michael Sarne

MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED
***/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, Harvey Keitel, Allen Garfield
screenplay by Tom Mankiewicz
directed by Peter Yates

by Walter Chaw Very much the product of its time, Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero!, the last of the three westerns the director made with Jimmy Stewart, appeared in 1968, the same year as the end of Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western cycle (Once Upon a Time in the West) and alongside such seminal generational discomfort flicks as Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead. And while it's not nearly so good as McLaglen/Stewart's devastating Civil War idyll Shenandoah, Bandolero! is still better than it probably should be, saved by its above-the-line talent. With Raquel Welch as a freshly widowed Mexican woman ("I was a whore when I was 12–my family never went hungry"–and so it went in Welch's career) and a good, if woefully miscast Dean Martin as Stewart's no-account, bank-robbin' outlaw brother, the picture is a border film, the basis in many ways for Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and one that contents itself with tepid character melodrama unfolding at a snail's pace along the road to Ensenada.

Posse (1975) – DVD

June 9, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Western

*½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Kirk Douglas, Bruce Dern, Bo Hopkins, James Stacy
screenplay by William Roberts and Christopher Knopf
directed by Kirk Douglas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Posse performs the not-inconsiderable feat of taking the iconoclastic spirit of '70s cinema and rendering it completely banal, going through the motions without believing in any of them and repeating gestures it fails to completely understand. Whether this is due to it being the directorial debut of star Kirk Douglas–who doesn't exactly belong to the Film Generation his film mechanically apes–is unclear, but Posse's simple inversion of authority and criminality is so inadequate as a genre critique that it spits more in the eye of the audience than in that of its limply-invoked Man. What remains is a series of blunt narrative events lacking in formal resonance to the extent that they seem to have been communicated through tin cans linked by string.

Too Late the Hero (1970) – DVD

May 19, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Ian Bannen, Harry Andrews
screenplay by Robert Aldrich and Lukas Heller
directed by Robert Aldrich

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Too Late the Hero is the consummate "solid flick"–sturdy, well-written, and just thoughtful enough to keep its machinations from working on autopilot. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it is suffused with a dread and a tension that lift it out of the bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission ghetto and into something more sober and dignified. Whether or not it is the subterfuge Vietnam allegory of cult legend, it's a war film about people–not iron-jawed superheroes–whose selfless deeds have all the more impact when placed in context with the cowardice and stupidity of others. In the end, it does mouth certain pieties about that heroism that keep it from being too corrosive, but in this age of Black Hawk Down and Iraq prison scandals, it's refreshing for its refusal to knuckle under to the myth of the glorious warrior.

Ned Kelly (1970) – DVD

April 7, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, UK, Western

*/**** | Image B- Sound C
starring Mick Jagger, Clarissa Kaye-Mason, Mark McManus, Ken Goodlet
screenplay by Tony Richardson and Ian Jones
directed by Tony Richardson

by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the islets of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, just off the coast of Performance and Mad Dog Morgan, floats Tony Richardson's less visited, incomprehensible, woefully miscalculated Ned Kelly. Edited with a cheese grater and scored with bizarre faux-Aussie folk by strange bedfellows Shel Silverstein and Waylon Jennings, all while giving lie to David Mamet-as-director's claims to originality in dispensing with exposition in favour of oblique, impenetrable dialogue and stilted performances, Ned Kelly is also home to one of the worst performances by a rock star in a world that knows Graffiti Bridge and Glitter. Really just the kissing cousin of such of its contemporary counter-cultural misfires as Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the panicked 1970 policy of giving the kids what they want, whatever that might be, is filtered here through the disturbing prism of a 42-year-old Englishman's perspective. (Admittedly, as angry young men go, Mick Jagger is a better choice than Breckinridge's Rex Reed.) Curiously though, as it so often does, the rare convergence of everything gone wrong makes for pretty compulsive viewing.

Black Sunday (1977) – DVD

April 6, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, Marthe Keller, Fritz Weaver
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw Before Thomas Harris created a genius shrink-turned-serial murderer, he wrote the everything-old-is-new-again terrorist saga Black Sunday, managing to incorporate the Super Bowl into its tale of good intelligence saving the day. How novel. What's constant between this and Harris's Hannibal Lecter trilogy is his interest in broken heroes: the inversion of the man of action archetype that germinated in the Fifties Western tradition and flowered in the voodoo ego-nomics of the Reagan-mad Eighties, locating Black Sunday firmly in the deep well of Seventies cinema–filthy with ineffectual champions and astringent endings. But where Harris's novel understood its place in the bittersweet, paranoid zeitgeist, Black Sunday, with its all-star cast (Robert Shaw two years after Jaws, Bruce Dern at his peak, Marthe Keller a year removed from Marathon Man), megalomaniacal producer Robert Evans, and blockbuster aspirations, proves to be another Star Wars-style harbinger of the impending end of what was possibly the most amazing period in film in history.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) [Divimax] – DVD

March 18, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, Horror, Italy, Thriller, Zombie

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross
written and directed by George A. Romero

Dawnofthedead1978cap

by Walter Chaw There's a shopping mall in Colorado called "Colorado Mills" that bubbles with the kind of nameless existential dread generally reserved for terrariums and introspective box turtles. Its architecture–a mountain womb of logs and waterfalls–seeks to replicate the feeling of a village, so that the impulsive consumerism it encourages is disguised as foraging in some fantasy of frontier life and the mob of co-capitalist pilgrims shuffling along appear as a murmuring throng of fellow villagers–wayfarers with whom you have a polite agreement to neither speak to nor make eye contact with. Human interaction is dangerous, for it dispels the illusion of comfort.

The Pink Panther Film Collection [6-Disc DVD Collector’s Set – Special Edition] – DVD

March 16, 2004Posted in1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Romance, UK

THE PINK PANTHER (1964)
*½/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Robert Wagner, Capucine
screenplay by Maurice Richlin and Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Peter Sellers, Elke Sommer, George Sanders, Herbert Lom
screenplay by William Peter Blatty and Blake Edwards, based on the play by Harry Kurnitz
directed by Blake Edwards

THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN (1976)
***½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Lesley-Anne Down, Burt Kwouk
screenplay by Frank Waldman, Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER (1978)
*½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, Dyan Cannon
screenplay by Ron Clark, Frank Waldman, Blake Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER (1982)
*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Peter Sellers, David Niven, Herbert Lom, Joanna Lumley
screenplay by Frank Waldman, Tom Waldman, Blake Edwards, Geoffrey Edwards
directed by Blake Edwards

by Bill Chambers If you've never seen the one that started it all, then it will probably surprise you to learn that The Pink Panther is all but a pre-emptive strike against a possible franchise–practically the only thing about it that became canonical and conventional was the animated title sequence. (This upheld tradition of a cartoon beneath the opening credits formalized a cottage industry for James Bond distributor United Artists.) Series lynchpin Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) isn't even the central figure; that would be Sir Charles Litton (David Niven), a playboy plotting to steal the coveted Pink Panther diamond by ingratiating himself with its owner, Dala (Once Upon a Time in the West's Claudia Cardinale), a pampered princess decompressing at a ski chalet in Cortina.

Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) [Widescreen] + Death in Venice (1971) – DVDs

March 2, 2004Posted in1970s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Italy, Romance

UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Diane Lane, Sandra Oh, Lindsay Duncan, Raoul Bova
screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the book by Frances Mayes
directed by Audrey Wells

DEATH IN VENICE
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
starring Dirk Bogarde, Mark Burns, Björn Andrésen, Silvana Mangano
screenplay by Luchino Visconti, Nicola Badalucco, based on the novel by Thomas Mann
directed by Luchino Visconti

by Bill Chambers Can't afford that trip to Italy? Consider the next best thing: a jaunt to your local video store, where you can pick up the diametrically opposed but concurrently-released travelogues Under the Tuscan Sun and Death in Venice. I confess I'm only covering them together because it struck me as funny to do so–it's doubtful there's a lot of overlap between the pictures' fanbases, though I'd sooner recommend Under the Tuscan Sun to a Death in Venice admirer than vice-versa: in my experience, devotees of so-called "chick flicks" are notoriously unadventurous moviegoers, while it should go without saying that anyone high on Death in Venice lives by the benefit of the doubt. Both vastly overrated by their supporters, they at least beat watching somebody's vacation slides.

Fight for Your Life (1977) – DVD

February 26, 2004Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blue Underground, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring William Sanderson, Robert Judd, Reginald Bythewood, Lela Small
screenplay by Straw Weisman
directed by Robert A. Endelson

by Bill Chambers The package containing Fight for Your Life drew me towards it the way a pie cooling on the windowsill draws fugitives from chain gangs. Something I hate about myself is my susceptibility to ironic temptation: Here was this DVD with one third of "Newhart"'s Larry, Darryl, and Darryl having a barechested brawl with a Famous Amos look-alike on the cover, and like a not-so-metaphorical rat to cheese, I had to spin it immediately. Further patronizing me was a pull quote from All Movie Guide declaring Fight for Your Life "the least politically correct movie ever seen in American theaters." Coupled with my foreknowledge of the film's ongoing ban in the United Kingdom, why, that's "I gots ta know" territory. The film was now in the challenging position of having to meet a set of lopsided expectations: If it turned out to be anything less than transcendent schlock, I'd feel cheated.

Hell Up in Harlem (1973) [Soul Cinema] – DVD

February 7, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Commentary A+
starring Fred Williamson, Julius W. Harris, Gloria Hendry, Margaret Avery
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bill Chambers There have been wiser marketing decisions: MGM leaves Black Caesar out of their "Best of Soul Cinema" DVD set while including the film's sequel, Hell Up in Harlem. Having not yet managed to see Black Caesar for myself, I wondered if that's why Hell Up in Harlem left me as confused as I was entertained. But according to writer-director Larry Cohen in his DVD commentary, one of the finest I've ever listened to (and worth a purchase by itself), that ain't the half of it. In their infinite wisdom, AIP cashed in on a follow-up to Black Caesar so soon after its release that Cohen and star Fred Williamson–whose title character had perished at the end of the original, not that anyone seemed to care–had to shoot it in tandem with It's Alive! and That Man Bolt, respectively. Since those productions were situated on opposite coasts, Williamson couldn't film his lead role in Hell Up in Harlem until one or the other wrapped, resulting in a shake-and-bake screenplay whose main dramatic consideration was how to get away with an abundance of over-the-shoulder shots of the star. This is also why Williamson's character inexplicably decides to move to L.A., and why he boards a flight to Los Angeles at L.A.X. International.

The Wind and the Lion (1975) – DVD

January 14, 2004Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, Brian Keith, John Huston
written and directed by John Milius

by Walter Chaw Based extremely loosely on an actual event, John Milius’s The Wind and the Lion is better examined as a treatise, and an informed one, on America’s continuing role as an Imperialist force bullying esteem under the title of World’s Policeman. A moral right to use force to enforce ideology–a manifest belief, in fact, that the United States is an outlaw, frontier nation existing under the thinnest shine of civilization (“Bring it on” our current alpha male cowboy growls, embroiled in what he once referred to as a “crusade” in a modern Middle East)–is offered a mirror in the film first by Brian Keith’s exceptional Theodore Roosevelt, then by rakish Berber the Raisuli (Sean Connery), at war with his own Moroccan government in showdowns recalling Lawrence of Arabia tumbled with The Wild Bunch. The marriage of epic romance and the epic romanticization of brutality is, after all, the main ingredient of Milius’s work as screenwriter (Apocalypse Now, contributions to Dirty Harry and its immediate sequel, Magnum Force) and director (the underestimated Red Dawn), as well as the stuff with which the west, at least in the history books, was won.

National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) [Double Secret Probation Edition – Widescreen] – DVD

November 20, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom
screenplay by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenny & Chris Miller
directed by John Landis

by Walter Chaw Films that spawn genres are unusual, and if twenty-five years and dozens of imitators have diluted the sex and scatology formula of John Landis's National Lampoon's Animal House a bit, nothing touches the tightness of an enterprise that finds a golf ball hit into cafeteria stew in one scene and John Belushi casually eating that golf ball a few minutes later. The picture doesn't so much cover the bases as draw the diamond, casting the evil dean of a small college, Wormer (John Vernon), against a band of fun-loving frat boys led by smooth Otter (Tim Matheson), animalistic Bluto (Belushi), hapless Flounder (Stephen Furst), and audience surrogate Pinto (Tom Hulce). What distinguishes Animal House's irreverence from feckless anarchy is the same thing that distinguishes the films of the Farrelly Brothers, the true inheritors of the picture's legacy: a strong feeling for character and a congenial willingness to transgress that rings as honest even as it tickles at inappropriate.

Battlestar Galactica (1978) [Widescreen] – DVD

November 11, 2003Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D
starring Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, Lorne Greene
screenplay by Glen A. Larson
directed by Richard A. Colla

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I find it supremely ironic that George Lucas had the nerve to sue the Battlestar Galactica team for the crime of plagiarism–this, after plundering Kurosawa and Ford and Leni Riefenstahl (and God knows who else) to create the po-mo patchwork quilt known as Star Wars. It doesn't really reflect well on your case when the thieves in question have actually ripped off fewer movies (and cultures, and archetypes) than the alleged textual victim; accordingly, Lucas lost the argument and the case. And yet, on some spiritual level, the bigger theft has more integrity than the smaller one. At the very least, Star Wars gives the impression that somebody wanted to make it: it's in awe of its sources, and that respect surges through every purloined frame. The Galactica crew only respected money and career opportunities, making the irritant of this would-be cash cow's maiden voyage seem like a mosquito the size of a Cessna.

The Christopher Lee Collection – DVD

November 10, 2003Posted in1960s, 1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, DVD, Germany, Horror, Italy, Liechtenstein, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

CIRCUS OF FEAR (1966)
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Christopher Lee, Leo Genn, Anthony Newlands, Heinz Drache
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by John Moxey

THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU (1968)
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Rohm, Howard Marion Crawford
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU (1969)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Maria Perschy, Richard Greene
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

THE BLOODY JUDGE
Il trono di fuoco (1970)
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Maria Schell, Leo Genn, Maria Rohm
screenplay by Anthony Scott Veitch
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw The sort of box set that horror fans and film historians slaver over (though Sino-Western ambassadors probably aren't too pleased about), Blue Underground's exceptionally, reverently remastered four-disc "Christopher Lee Collection" gathers four obscure Lee pictures–The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Circus of Fear, and The Bloody Judge–in presentations so vibrant and beautiful that they're almost enough to distract from the uniform tediousness of the films themselves. A little like avant-garde cinema, these pictures–all but one (Circus of Fear) directed by the notoriously, appallingly untalented Jess Franco–function better as theory than fact, unfolding on staid soundstage environments with single camera set-ups, stock footage, and jump cuts, and squandering, for the most part, the magisterial presence and delivery of Lee. (For the record, a lethal drinking game could probably be devised around the number of times Franco zooms to different parts of the same shot to avoid the inconvenience of relighting or moving the camera around.)

The Cat in the Hat (1971) + The Lorax (1972) – DVDs

November 3, 2003Posted in1970s, 1980s, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Family, Television

THE CAT IN THE HAT
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt

THE LORAX
***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C
directed by Hawley Pratt

PONTOFFEL AND HIS MAGIC PIANO (1980)
Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?
**/**** Image B- Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Gerard Baldwin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Adapting for the screen a sensibility as singular as that of Dr. Seuss is a desperately tricky thing. It simply won't do to faithfully transpose the narrative, because narrative is hardly the point: Seuss is about nonsense wit both visual and verbal, and to fit it into a standard teleplay box is to destroy everything that makes his books special and unique. Nevertheless, the urge to bring the madness of Dr. Seuss to life is an understandable one, and so it should come as no surprise that in the Sixties and Seventies, CBS commissioned a series of animated specials designed to do just that.

The House That Dripped Blood (1972) – DVD

October 31, 2003Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Mystery

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras D+
starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Nyree Dawn Porter, Denholm Elliot
screenplay by Robert Bloch
directed by Peter Duffell

by Bill Chambers Anthology films are by their very nature self-defeating–especially, it seems, when the individual stories are linked by a framing device rather than by a thematic spine. (The majority of Hammer also-ran Amicus' output vs. Pulp Fiction, for example.) As the Amicus production The House That Dripped Blood draws to a close, you can't contain the urge to crown a favourite chapter; the rest of the picture becomes a useless husk. Based on the works of Psycho author Robert Bloch, The House That Dripped Blood stars genre stalwarts Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Pertwee, and still others (including an unrecognizably young Joss "Diplomatic Immunity!" Ackland) in separate tales all set inside a gothic manse that, we determine from interstitial vignettes, is unloaded on some steel-nerved rich dude roughly once a week by shifty real estate agent A.J. Stoker (John Bryans).

Halloween (1978) [25th Anniversary Divimax Edition] – DVD

October 30, 2003Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image B- Sound A Extras A
starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Kyes, P.J. Soles
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw As tempting as it is to write the umpteenth dissertation on the importance and brilliance of John Carpenter’s Halloween, it’s almost enough to say that there is very possibly no other seminal Seventies film–not The Godfather, not Star Wars, perhaps not even Jaws–that has had a greater influence on popular culture. It’s a movie about a fishbowl that exists now only in a fishbowl, a picture so examined that its sadistic ability to maintain an atmosphere of horrified anticipation is consumed by the intellectualization of its hedonism=death equation. A screening with fresh eyes reveals a picture and a filmmaker owing incalculable debts to Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.