1971-1980

Quote:
Originally shot in the mid-’70s, Agnès Varda’s vérité documentary Daguerréotypes has aged splendidly, acquiring flavors that would’ve been inconceivable at the time it was made. Back then, Varda hauled her camera around her Paris neighborhood on the Rue Daguerre, intending to capture what went on in the little shops in what was at the time one of the city’s most bustling commercial districts. As Varda explains early on in her voiceover narration, she wasn’t looking for esoterica. She filmed butchers, bakers, tailors, grocers, hairstylists, driving-school instructors… people she saw every day. And her vignettes are short: just a transaction or two, cut together with interviews about the merchants’ pasts, and portrait-style shots of them puttering about their businesses.Read More »

Synopsis:
Dr Simon Helder, sentenced to an insane asylum for crimes against humanity, recognises its director as the brilliant Baron Frankenstein, the man whose work he had been trying to emulate before his imprisonment. Frankenstein utilises Helder’s medical knowledge for a project he has been working on for some time. He is assembling a man from vital organs extracted from various inmates in the asylum. And the Baron will resort to murder to acquire the perfect specimens for his most ambitious project ever.Read More »

Synopsis:
This, the second adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel, is much closer to the source text than the original – Murder, My Sweet (1944), which tended to avoid some of the sleazier parts of the plot – but still concerns private eye Philip Marlowe’s attempts to locate Velma, a former dancer at a seedy nightclub and the girlfriend of Moose Malloy, a petty criminal just out of prison. Marlowe finds that once he has taken the case, events conspire to put him in dangerous situations, and he is forced to follow a confusing trail of untruths and double-crosses before he is able to locate Velma.Read More »

Synopsis:
Tia and Tony are two orphaned youngsters with extraordinary powers. Lucas Deranian poses as their uncle in order to get the kids into the clutches of Deranian’s megalomanical boss, evil millionaire Aristotle Bolt, who wants to exploit them. Jason, a cynical widower, helps Tia and Tony “escape to witch mountain,” while at the same time Tia and Tony help Jason escape the pain of the loss of his wife.Read More »

Millionaire playboy Hugo (whose lack of facial expressions give him the appearance of a Thundercat marionette) flies around Acapulco in his private helicopter to pick up sexy young women. He whisks them away to his secluded old castle, where he wines and dines them (among other things, *wink*). With the aid of his bald mute little helper Gorgo, he kills his dates, keeping their heads in a crystal cage and feeding their chopped up body parts to his 1,000-strong army of blood thirty, flesh hungry cats.Read More »

Synopsis:Finding herself unable to cope with the divorce of her parents and the stress of daily life, 15-year-old Sarah Travis starts drinking in secret. At first, alcohol provides comfort and release. Then it sends her life spiraling out of control.Read More »

Plot
This film documents the coal miners’ strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk.Read More »

A circus on the brink of bankruptcy comes up with a new show mixing traditional circus acts with sex.

The directors Phyllis (1929-2012) and Eberhard Kronhausen (1915-2009) were a husband-and-wife team of sexologists, mainly active in the 1960s and 1970s. They wrote a number of books on sexuality and eroticism, made several films and amassed a collection of erotic art, which traveled around Europe in 1968 as the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art and then found a home in San Francisco as the Museum of Erotic Art.Read More »

After an official is nearly caught sleeping with a woman by her husband, he hires a greedy sorcerer to do away with the not-so-courageous man. Corpses hop, kung fu fighters are possessed, and all manner of spooky, supernatural action occurs.Read More »