Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 6th, 2011
A mother locks her child in a closet so she can have an uninterrupted tryst with her lover. But the couple is rudely interrupted after all, as they are bludgeoned to death. Ten years later, a group of friends arrive at the deserted house to party down. After doing so for a fair bit of running time, they then fall prey to a hulking masked maniac, who not only has the titular hammer, but also has all sorts of supernatural powers.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on April 12th, 2011
Dennis Mitchell always means well when he wants to help out his parents, or good ol' Mr. Wilson, but he also just wants to have a good time. ¼ helpful young lad but ¾ mischief, Dennis made the leap from the beloved comic strip by Hank Ketchum to the small screen for four seasons.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on March 3rd, 2011
Cynical, alcoholic ex-musician Paul Newman arrives in New Orleans with barely a cent to his name. Following a tip from scam-artist preacher Laurence Harvey, Newman lands a job as a DJ for WUSA, an extreme right wing/white power propaganda radio station. Newman has no patience for his employers' message, but he's happy to take the money and drink himself into an apathetic stupor.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 15th, 2011
George Papdapolis (Alex Karras) and Katherine Calder-Young (Susan Clark) meet on a Greek cruise, and, after a whirlwind romance, return to Chicago. They're a bit of an odd couple – she's a blue-blood, complete with male secretary, and he's an ex-football player. The cross-class romance is barely underway, however, when they suddenly find themselves the guardians of the unspeakably adorable seven-year-old Webster (played by twelve-year-old Emmanuel Lewis) after his parents die (George had agreed to be his godfather back in the day).
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 15th, 2011
Johnathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was never meant to be a children's tale. It is one of the most corrosive satires in the English language, one that has lost none of its brilliant venom over the passage of centuries. But endless bowdlerizations have given its first two sections (the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingag) the reputation for being children's classics.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 6th, 2010
Erle Stanley Gardner wrote crime fiction, and while many of his 100 or so works are unknown to most of us, he created a character that has become as identified with criminal lawyers as any other in fiction. It was in these crime novels that Perry Mason first faced a courtroom. He developed a style where he would investigate these terrible crimes his clients were on trial for. He would find the real killer, and in what has become a Hollywood cliché, reveal his findings in a crucial moment during the trial.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 3rd, 2010
Season 5 of this most well-meaning of sitcoms finds a major change. With the cast now having aged to the point that not all the girls could reasonably be in high school together, Mrs. Garrett (Charlotte Rae) opens Edna's Edibles, a bakery-slash-coffee-shop, and the opening two-parter establishes the new status quo (essentially doing whatever is necessary to keep the main characters together). Otherwise, things proceed as they always have, with each story combining standard sitcom hijinks with Important Life Lessons and forays into weighty subjects. So, for example, the friendship between Natalie (Mindy Cohn) and Tootie (Kim Fields) hits a rough patch when Natalie's reaction to being asked out by Tootie's cousin is perceived, by Tootie, to be racist.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on October 15th, 2010
Gunsmoke, in all of its 20 seasons, making it the longest running prime-time drama of all time, has such a strong legacy that it feels odd to review it. Thankfully the challenge is an enjoyable one as the show is at a full head of steam in its fourth season (it was ranked #1 at this time) and each episode is still as engrossing today as it was over 4 decades ago.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on September 20th, 2010
A nunsploitation box set was always an inevitability, and here the good people at Cult Epics chime in with just such a collection, one limited to 2500 copies. There are only two films here, but they are two good ones, the works of strong directors. One is a distinctively idiosyncratic work, showing the unmistakable hand of its filmmaker. The other will quite simply knock you out the back wall.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on August 7th, 2010
“Have gun, will travel reads the card of a man. A knight without armor in a savage land…”. Those words ended every episode of Have Gun Will Travel, sung by Johnny Western in a time that such words could be sung without irony. Outside of Richard Boone’s black-clad, craggy Rhett Butler gone-to-seed gunfighter, that song was all I could really recall about this venerable Western from television’s golden age. Would it, like so many revisited shows from my youth, ultimately disappoint? Or would it hold up fifty years after it was originally broadcast, viewed as it would be by the far more jaded, cynical man I’ve grown into?
