“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”

If Zita Johan went off into the Gary Cooper Morocco desert with Valentino as a stud MUMMY and there was 50 SHADES OF GREY UN-PC whipping and dominance head games Stockholm Syndrome romance, well that gives you some of the plot. PRE-CODE RULEZ!

Who wouldn’t love to go to L.A. from NYC via zeppelin? So what if it takes a week? Open air rear observation compartments! Farmers looking up, amazed, waving, scratching their heads in disbelief… rivers, lakes, Montana…

istaVision, it’s also what Hitch shot VERTIGO on… and now both those films too make more sense, VERTIGO especially always seemed too traveloguey for a supposed top ten of all time classic. Now, if it was on Blu-Ray I’d get it even though the DVD version I have is pretty damned good and I don’t even really love it… yet

Price’s florid hamminess fills in the sparse patches of Corman’s sometimes spare mise en scene, and the sparseness conversely gives Price lots of room to floridly ham. Add Les Baxter’s crazy scores, some good freaky psychedelic California painters to make the portraits of dead and evil
uncles and incestuous sisters and flowing red paint credits, and sharp scripts by Richard Matheson and pre-CHINATOWN Robert Towne, and viola!

Homicidal gang debs, tripping youth, murderous charismatic hippie cult leaders,German lesbian junkie spies, sexy German terrorists: 6 Rare, Strange, awesome films (all on Netflix Streaming) from or about the late 60s-early 70s.

There’s nothing wrong with these films per se, they stir deep emotions; they move us, en masse; they spark enraptured conversation on the drive home from the mall-tiplex, are superb examples of craftsmanship, and most importantly, they make bourgeois Oscar voters feel good about themselves, and their profession; these films rub the voters’ shoulders and whisper in their wrinkly ears – “you, my darling Academy member, are the makers of our dreams.”

In darker shadowy lairs, Myrna Loy meets with her devoted astrologer, Swami Yogadaci (the ever villainous C. Henry Gordon) to figure out how and when the constellations want her to assassinate her former sorority snubbers. Loy’s the villain, ostensibly, but you’ll be rooting for her all the way (unless you’ve never felt the sting of a snubbing yourself).

Unseen for years thanks to its “dangerously progressive” attitudes towards sexual relationships outside wedlock, tomorrow, Tuesday 12/6/12! Criterion has released it in the stand-alone glory it deserves, replete with extras and an essay by the great Kim Morgan.

William is one of the great re-discovered icons of the pre-code era, exhumed by TCM like a King Tut of badass Satanic bravado and good humor, a cross between the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood and Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

Murders are talked over via close-ups of cat statues, and a very dirty fella named Blackie gets offed by Guy Kibee (as you’ve never seen him before!).

For the Halloween devouring Other in you: Here’s a small sampling of films for inciting you or your other to an orgy of castration and Kali-esque bloodletting…

  It’s not ‘rare’ by TCM standards, but its not easily available on DVD, so hey – you should maybe DV-R this if you haven’t already and then keep it on there forever, to watch when you’re home sick with a cold. Nothing beats the Veronica Lake Effect! Key is based on a Dashiell Hammett [...]

I wrote the description below back in 2009  (full review here) based on a rare screening years before at the Film Forum pre-code festival. It used to be so very rare, but tonight on TCM that all changes, so set your DVRs! ———-(From Acidemic 1/23/09) Faulkner’s dank Gothic ambiance suffuses DRAKE (it’s based on his [...]

Proud as I am of New York for approving gay marriage (see my dissection of THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, here) I can’t help but see marriage itself as some kind of burlesque of 50s American ideals.  Why get married at all?  Anyone? As my old guitarist’s South African mom used to say to us, [...]

Anyone who’s seen any of the GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO movies must surely notice the similarities between Strauss-Kahn and the unsavory sex addicted pervs in high places that are the targets of our avenging heroine, Lisbeth Salander.

Ekertoth has dug up a million idle hours of eye-to-the-grindstone page-turning sensation for curious readers, and they’d be doing a disservice to cinema, Sweden, and Satan, to miss it

These kids are aping anime, creating a dead look about their pupils, removing all glimmer of intelligence from their face as if trying to pass as a zombie in a post-Romero school environment, where any glimmer of humanity is met with devouring and slobber.

We live in a weird age, full of metatextual interconnectivity, zeitgeist-riding, and death. Now that Liz Taylor’s gone, and her legacy and oeuvre suddenly unearthed down to the most arcane and forgotten of projects. Is it time, now, to recognize what John Waters has long known, that BOOM! is the bomb. John Waters introducing BOOM! [...]

Can it be true? Has the living legend Elizabeth Taylor finally merged back into the heaven from which she came? I guess it is. I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of her in the next few days, but we don’t really need to be reminded how awesome she was. She never left her throne [...]