Exploitation & Erotica · Photo Essays
“This question of what makes a ‘bad girl’ is posed by the film’s title and answered by its title sequence – implied in the formal quotations (pinups) that inform each[…]
“I found it hard myself to believe that the home-video releases of one of the most highly regarded films ever made could be incomplete, but they are, and I still wouldn’t believe it if the evidence were not indisputable.”
Directors · Horror · Photo Essays
“The opening scenes of Freaks demonstrate a sophisticated use of staging, framing, editing, and camera movement to suture the audience into a complex set of sympathies. It is the work of a director in full control of the medium, able to use the camera to reveal a rich subtext beneath the dialogue.”
“The thumb isn’t good enough for you. You have to use your whole body.” Naked underneath her trenchcoat, frightened hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) gets private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to[…]
Director George Sidney is known mainly for: (1) glamourizing women, and (2) showing the audience a good time. In The Three Musketeers (1948), he does both. The principal woman glamourized[…]
Do you recognize this dastardly villain? It’s Boris Karloff, playing a hostile Native American in The Last of the Mohicans (1920) directed by Maurice Tourneur. The hero of the film[…]
“Magnolia’s most instructive revelation occurs obliquely and, quite literally, microscopically. The shot occurs during the climactic rain of frogs, as Claudia and her mother, panicked, cling to each other in Claudia’s apartment. The camera bends away from their embrace toward one of Claudia’s paintings, zooming in so that we can read the words “but it did happen” in the bottom right corner . . .”
“George Lucas, engaged in an endless quest for perfect, seamless fantasy, hopes to erase any trace of the tricks necessary to build it. Oz instead understands that the evidence of artifice can itself bear meaning: in this case, that our wildest, most wish-fulfilling fantasies will still reflect our limitations.”
Speaking of campy extraterrestrials, do you recognize this classic horror film star? Here’s another publicity image from the same production. I hope you’re as surprised and delighted as I was. It’s Ernest Thesiger,[…]
Reaching across time, this poster for Gregg Araki’s 2011 film, Ka-Boom, echoes the kaleidoscopic poster design of Daniel Haller’s 1970 psychedelic monster-fest, The Dunwich Horror (screenplay by Curtis Hanson), and[…]
“And it insists on looking.”
How odd to see Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth (Sidney Salkow 1964) wandering alienated through the same virtually deserted suburban neighborhood of Rome through which an alienated[…]
I like these two movie posters, one for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), the other for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and I suspect their similarity is anything but[…]
Photo Essays · Reviews · Silents
More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943’s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his[…]
Actors & Personalities · Photo Essays
Hand me those contacts!
“It was once the figurehead of a slave ship. That’s where our people come from. From the misery and pain of slavery.” ~ I Walked with a Zombie
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Photo Essays
“Be aware: there are forces at work here of which we have no knowledge.”
With regard to the whole issue of dubbing, conventional wisdom tells us that foreign films are best viewed in their original language. And I tend to agree with that. But[…]
For almost fifty years, Alfred Hitchcock filled his films with a select group of images, including houses, staircases, women’s hair, the human hand, the human eye, the “uncanny,” and the[…]
