Description: During a terrible thunderstorm, a married couple, Maria and Paul, travelling with their friend, Claire, take refuge in a small Spanish hotel. That night, while witnessing Paul and Claire making love, a distraught Maria spots a young man wanted for a crime of passion hiding on a rooftop. Compelled to help the murderer elude the authorities, Maria embarks on a dangerous journey that will change her life… forever.Read More »
Description: Sorcerer is a 1977 film, produced and directed by William Friedkin, starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal and Amidou. It is a remake of the 1953 French film Le Salaire de la Peur (Wages of Fear). Sorcerer followed Friedkin’s highly successful The French Connection and The Exorcist, but was a major commercial failure. The budget was estimated at over $22 million, a substantial sum at the time. With a gross of $12 million, the film did not recoup its costs. The film was co-produced by Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, with Universal handling U.S. distribution and Paramount handling the international release. Sorcerer is also notable for its electronic score by Tangerine Dream, which was their first Hollywood film soundtrack, and led to them becoming popular soundtrack composers in the 80s.Read More »
“Here’s a lost curio from the acid-inspired days of indie filmmaking. A tripped out vision of insanity featuring a tour de farce performance by Mickey Rooney. It’s also an amazing achievement, which quickly destroys any preconceptions you might walk in with…Almost the entire film is set in a warehouse chocked with hallucinatory backdrops, old movie props, scrap sculptures, and cobwebs. And Rooney (who’s in nearly every scene) stars as B.J. Lang, a crazed old man who believes he’s the greatest director of all time in the midst of planning his next epic — while in actuality he’s just a deluded has-been stumbling through an abandoned building. Looking particularly haggard and sporting a scraggly beard, Rooney gives a brave, over-the-top performance consisting of stream of consciousness monologues and acting that transcends the boundaries of camp.Read More »
Description: David Cronenberg directed this screen adaptation of a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke which explores how an act of heroism unexpectedly changes a man’s life. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) lives a quiet life in a small Indiana town, running the local diner with his wife, Edie (Maria Bello), and raising their two children. But the quiet is shattered one day when a pair of criminals on the run from the police walk into his diner just before closing time. After they attack one of the customers and seem ready to kill several of the people inside, Tom jumps to the fore, grabbing a gun from one of the criminals and killing the invaders. Tom is immediately hailed as a hero by his employees and the community at large, but Tom seems less than comfortable with his new notoriety. One day, a man with severe facial scars, Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), sits down at the counter and begins addressing Tom as Joey, and begins asking him questions about the old days in Philadelphia. While Tom seems puzzled, Carl’s actions suggest that the quiet man pouring coffee at the diner may have a dark and violent past he isn’t eager to share with others — as well as some old scores that haven’t been settled.Read More »
Bette Davis’ famous walk-out from her home studio of Warner Bros. may have hurt her financially, but in the long run it paid off with bigger parts in better films. Like many Warners films of the period, Marked Woman was “torn from today’s headlines.” Specifically, it was inspired by the recent downfall of gangster Lucky Luciano, who at one time controlled all prostitution activities in New York.
The ladies herein are euphemistically characterized as “night club hostesses,” but when Luciano look-alike Johnny Vanning (Eduardo Cianelli) shows up at a fancy clip-joint to give the girls their marching orders, the audience can tell exactly what’s going on.Read More »
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An intriguing hybrid, this yarn about a young, John Lennon-like West Country lad (David Essex) who abandons his A-levels (‘I’ve had enough of sodding school!’) and heads off to find his fortune in ashabby, seaside town is made in the same downbeat, naturalistic way as the so-called kitchen sink films of a decade before, but boasts a very upbeat rock’n’roll soundtrack.
Director Whatham (better known for his TV work than for anything he did on the big screen) elicits suprisingly strong performances from Essex and from Ringo Starr as his teddy boy guru. Look out, too, for Billy Fury as the aptly named rocker, Stormy Tempest. The film marked an important staging post in the career of its relentlessly ambitious producer, David Puttnam, and spawned an excellent sequel, Stardust.
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This big budget entry from the early ’80s horror boom is one of the most underrated of that genre. The Entity succeeds despite potentially exploitative subject matter because it tells its story in a serious, respectful style. Frank de Felitta’s script devotes as much time to building three-dimensional characters and detailing the inner workings of psychology and parapsychology as it does creating shocks. As a result, the horrific parts of the tale are more effective because they are couched in a compelling reality. That said, The Entity never feels like anything less than a horror movie, thanks to forceful direction by Sidney J. Furie, who uses moody cinematography from Stephen Burum and an obsessive, minimalist score by Charles Bernstein to create an edgy, off-kilter atmosphere guaranteed to keep the audience tense between the set pieces. Finally, and most importantly, The Entity hooks the viewer thanks to phenomenal performances. Barbara Hershey gives a warm, totally credible performance as a decent, strong woman thrust into a bizarre situation, and Ron Silver adds excellent support as a well-meaning psychologist whose desire to find a rational explanation harms the situation as often as it helps. On the downside, a few of the makeup effects aren’t very convincing (especially when compared with strong physical and visual effects) and the open-ended coda might turn off some viewers, but the overall craftsmanship of the film is too strong to be denied. In short, The Entity is worthy of rediscovery by horror fans who want a little substance with their shocks. — Donald Guarisco (AMG)Read More »
The film, made prior to the full enforcement of the Hays code, is remembered today for its strong sexual content, embodied mostly in the character of the prostitute, Ivy, played by Miriam Hopkins.
The secret of the astonishing transformation scenes was not revealed until decades later (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse).
Hyde enjoys the rain.
Hyde enjoys the rain.
A series of rotating filters matching the make-up was used on the lenses, enabling the make-up to be gradually exposed or made invisible, depending upon the scene.
Wally Westmore’s make-up for Hyde, simian and hairy with tusks influenced greatly the popular image of Hyde in media and comic books (the American Classics Illustrated edition of Jekyll and Hyde clearly based its design of Hyde on the Fredric March movie, although it is more toned down); in part this reflected the novella’s implication of Hyde as embodying repressed evil and hence being semi-evolved or simian in appearance.Read More »
Noir and sci-fi specialist Byron Haskin (I Walk Alone, The War of the Worlds) takes on The Boss in this gritty crime classic. Following World War I, ruthless veteran Matt Brady (John Payne, 99 River Street) inherits the clout of his political kingpin brother and climbs the ladder of corruption all the way to the top of the state. His amoral practices and sheer arrogance lead to broken friendships (William Bishop, The Redhead from Wyoming) and romances (model-turned-actress Doe Avedon and Gloria McGehee, A Child Is Waiting) along the way. Based on the real-life scandal of Kansas City politico Tom Pendergast, The Boss is celluloid dynamite from the pen of Dalton Trumbo (Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave), originally uncredited due to Hollywood’s blacklisting.Read More »