I’m not sure what I expected, watching this. Something a bit silly, a bit schlocky, a bit of mindless fun, soon to be forgotten. I was pleasantly surprised. “The Cabin in the Woods” is a horror/comedy, and on a superficial look seems like it ought to be the ultimate in cliché. I mean, five (young)…
“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” was the last film directed by Sidney Lumet, a director with a career spanning sixty years and included masterpieces such as “The Verdict”, “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon”. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei. The film involves two brothers plotting to rob their…
“Eternal Winter” was directed by Attila Szasz, and stars Marina Gera, Sandor Csanvi, and Laura Dobros. It begins in 1944 Hungary, when Iren and other women of her village are rounded up by Soviet soldiers and deported to Siberia as forced labour. They have been taken because they are Swabians, a German-speaking minority in Hungary,…
In 1948 The Red Shoes was released, a story about passion warping into obsession. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, collectively known as the Archers, directed this film. ‘The Red Shoes’ is a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, which they used as the inspiration for the plot. Briefly the story revolves around a ballet company, the…
Fifty-four years ago a low-budget horror movie called “Night of the Living Dead” was released. The director, George Romero, and everyone involved did not anticipate how this film would become a horror movie classic, inspiring endless imitations and homages through to the present day. “Night of the Living Dead” was by no means the first…
“Bullitt”, a crime/action movie, starred Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn. It’s a much more intelligent film than you might expect, which is what makes it a classic. Police lieutenant Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is asked by politician Walter Chalmers (Vaughn) to guard a mobster until a Senate hearing into organized crime, where the man will give…
Produced by Val Lewton, and directed by Robert Wise (who would direct “The Sound of Music” twenty years later), “The Body Snatcher” involves a doctor and student in Edinburgh in the nineteenth century, who are involved with a grave robber who sells them cadavers for dissection. The wonderful Boris Karloff stars as the grave robber…
An oldy but definitely still a goody, “The Thin Man” is based on a Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name. William Powell and Myrna Loy star as Nick and Nora Charles, a detective and his wife who become embroiled in a murder investigation, in this classic mystery/comedy. It has a cast of bizarre characters…
“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,…
“Cat People” is a fantasy/horror B movie, directed by Jacques Tourneur. It is one of the films of the period produced by Val Lewton, who has become well-known for his production of these types of films that are a cut above the quality of this sort of film. While “Cat People” has many flaws, it…
Eclectic Assemblage 