Better than you think – the films of Val Lewton

We’ve all heard of the so-called B movie, the low budget films, churned out at speed by studios, usually with pretty terrible plots and casts. Often that is quite true. Sometimes, however, these second-class films can produce something impressive, such as a selection of movies produced in the forties for RKO studios by Val Lewton.…

Review “The Comedy of Terrors” (1963)

Vincent Price. Peter Lorre. Boris Karloff. Basil Rathbone. All in one movie. What’s not to love? “The Comedy of Terrors” is a comedy/horror (not sure there’s that much horror in it, really) that is a great deal of fun. It was directed by Jacques Tourneur (‘Cat People’, ‘I walked with a zombie’) and the screenplay…

Review “I walked with a zombie” (1943)

“I walked with a zombie”, in spite of it’s incredibly lurid, B-movie title, is surprisingly decent. The main character Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is a nurse who is hired to go to a Caribbean island (fictitious, but with similarities to Haiti), to look after a sugar plantation owner’s sick wife. Tom Conway plays Paul Holland,…