Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on January 11th, 2008
Some films have the sort of subject matter that just screams “cult in the making.” Sometimes, the attempt at cult status is so blatant that the sense of the film trying too hard is off-putting. On other occasions, said status is a by-product of a filmmaker simply having assured fun with torqued material. Bubba Ho-Tep is one such example. A brand new one is Black Sheep.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 11th, 2008
Arthur Kennedy and wife Teresa Wright are an older childless couple who discover a young man (Tom Happer) living in the crawlspace of their basement. Though they are initially alarmed, he seems harmless, and they take him under their wing. What seems to be a nice, if bizarre, solution for everyone becomes tense when Happer, tormented by locals, shows a potential for great violence.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 8th, 2008
Nathan Maguire (David Leon) is having a very bad day. The boneheaded bully at school has it in for him. Jessica (Samantha Mumba), the girl he loves, doesn’t show up for their meeting where he was finally going to declare his feelings, and then he sees her in the car of one of the local studs. Plus he gets soaked in the rain. And just to cap things off, he is accidentally hanged, and his distraught mother performs a voodoo ritual to bring him back from the dead, only the manual was missing a page and he returns as an infectious zombie. Oops.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on January 4th, 2008
All right, after a longer delay than expected (my apologies), here with go with John Brahm’s The Lodger (1944). This is actually a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 effort, but Brahm’s film stands just fine on its own, thank you very much. Laird Cregar plays the title character. He is none other than Jack the Ripper, renting an upstairs room in a fashionable district. There he performs some rather dark medical experiments and obsesses over his deceased younger brother. Meanwhile, the family (pater familias Sir Cedric Hardwicke, mother Sara Allgood and singer/dancer daughter Merle Oberon) have more and more unanswered questions about their tenant. Hardwicke holds his suspicions at bay, but Allgood and Oberon become more and more nervous. Oberon has every reason to be, as her profession marks her as a likely Ripper target (so, yes, the fact that the actual killer’s victims were all prostitutes is rather glossed over). George Sanders shows up as the Scotland Yard detective assigned to the case, and also as Oberon’s love interest.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 4th, 2008
Every two years, the Wo Shing Society, an ancient Triad, elects its chairman. The two candidates this year are Lok, an amiable, level-headed, managerial type, and Big D, a flashy hothead cut from the same cloth as Tybalt. Big D throws bribes and around in an effort to win, but to no avail. Refusing to accept defeat, he resorts to violence, threatening to tear the Society apart. The question is whether Lok is made of the necessary stuff to make good his victory.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 24th, 2007
Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) is the lone human survivor in an LA devastated by a worldwide plague that killed most of the global population and turned the rest into vampires. For three years he has survived on his own, mourning his lost family and systematically staking every vampire he can find, working his way block by block through the city. Then, one day, he sees what appears to be another survivor...
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 24th, 2007
In Belle Époque Paris, the can-can is all the rage but also illegal, and Shirley MacLaine’s nightclub is cracked down on by uptight judge Louis Jourdan. MacLaine is defended by libertine lawyer Frank Sinatra. Jourdan falls for MacLaine, who is waiting perhaps in vain for Sinatra to marry her. Maurice Chevalier shows up to chuckle indulgently.
Posted in: Brain Blasters, Regular Columns by David Annandale on December 21st, 2007
Last week, I said I’d talk about John Brahm’s The Lodger this time around. I want to hold that off for another week, in order to put in my two cents’ worth on I Am Legend.
So here we are with the third adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic novel, and the first to actually use the title. There was certainly room for improvement on the other two. The Last Man On Earth (1964) is still the closest to the book, but Matheson himself was sufficiently displeased with what was done with his original script that he had his name replaced in the credits with a pseudonym. The Omega Man (1971) has some great early mood stuff and neat makeup for the creatures, but descends into risibility by the end. So is the third time the charm?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 18th, 2007
TV reporter Jason Behr is the reincarnation of warrior from 500 years ago, charged with protecting a woman (Amanda Brooks, also a reincarnation) whose destiny is to sacrifice herself so that a mystical giant serpent (an Imoogi) can become a dragon. Unfortunately, an evil Imoogi named Buraki wants the power for itself, and summons a giant reptilian army that lays waste to LA in the search for Brooks.
Posted in: Brain Blasters by David Annandale on December 14th, 2007
As I’ve indicated in this space before, one of the joys of the DVD age is the chance to see, at long last, films that one might have heard about since childhood, but that were unavailable until now. A recent addition to Fox’s Cinema Classics line is a case in point. Fox Horror Classics consists of three movies directed by John Brahm, and the one I want to talk about today is The Undying Monster (1942), which I first read about over thirty years ago.
