Blog Posts

It is time for a long-overdue tribute to Michael Ripper (1913-2000). Those in the know (You Know Who You Are) need no introduction to the British character actor, and we worship him for his innumerable roles in British horror films in the 60s, particularly those produced by Hammer Studios. Imagine, if you will, a dignified Marty Feldman with (usually) a beard, and you have a bit of an idea. Never the lead, but always a reassuring supporting character, ESPECIALLY if he played a barkeep. If Michael’s in the tavern, all…
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Godzilla has been a household name in North America almost for as long as he has been in Japan. Over the course of the last few years, most of his recent films have been appearing here in all their unedited, widescreen, subtitled glory. But the film that started it all was never properly seen here theatrically until last year, and only now is available on DVD for the first time, but it was worth the wait.

When producers Harold Ross and Richard Kay picked up Gojira (1954) for American distribution, th…
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Consider this a follow-up to last week’s column. In my musings about the Big Bug movies, I mentioned that Tarantula had only just become available for the first time as part of a Best Buy-exclusive box set of Universal SF flicks. I’ve managed to lay my hands on this set (again, you can track it down through Amazon if you’re not having any luck with Best Buy itself – for Canadian readers, I should mention that my attempts to track the disc down through the Best Buy website proved fruitless), and for fans of 50’…
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Big Bug movies. How can one not love them? They have bugs. They’re big. What else do you need to know before you hand out the Oscars?

They heyday of the Big Bug flick was, of course, the 1950’s, the era of the great SF boom in the cinema. The first, and best, of these films was Them! (1954). The title is deliberately coy about what the threat is, playing very consciously on Cold War paranoia (after all, who is responsible for everything going on in the world if not the mysterious “them”). Some initia…
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Elizabeth Bathory (or, more properly, Erzsébet Báthory) is one of those historical figures just made for horror film. A Hungarian aristocrat, she, if the stories are to be believed, had some 650 young women killed, and would, it has been said, roar from her seat as she watched the torture. And did I mention she believed bathing in blood would keep her eternally young? Eventually, the authorities had at her, and though she was not executed, all the windows and doors of her castle were bricked up, imprisoning her in da…
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Recently, Anchor Bay released, at long last, Cemetery Man< to DVD. In so doing, they made available one of the last gasps (for now) of truly first-rate Italian horror, and it might be worth while to spend a few minutes considering the director, Michele Soavi, a man who has been nowhere near as prolific a filmmaker as might be devoutly wished.

In my piece on Joe D’Amato a few weeks ago, I mentioned that the best film he was involved with was Soavi’s debut, StageFright (1987). One of the fascina…
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With The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee became the new kings of British horror, and their frequent co-starring roles made them a tandem the likes of which the industry hadn’t seen since the heyday of the Karloff-Lugosi double-threats of the late-30’s. Their films for Hammer and Amicus have long been fan faves, but the film I’m going to sing the praises of here doesn’t have quite the same profile as the likes of Horror of Dracula. Most horror fans of a certain vintage no…
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