That Pinocchio was a significant commercial failure is something I can sort of get my head around, but it ultimately seems pretty hard to believe that something so beautiful and heartfelt could be so soundly ignored. I have no such difficulty believe the same thing of the other Disney feature released in 1940, of unquestionably […]
After the miserable artistic failure of House of Frankenstein, there wasn’t much that the next Universal horror movie had to do besides show up to be an improvement. But House of Dracula does more than just show up. Perhaps because the filmmakers realised on some level that this was to be the final hurrah for […]
I have not been able to determine much information about the box office fortunes of the Universal monster films in the 1940s, so I cannot say if Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Son of Dracula, the studio’s two franchise entries from 1943, made any particular sum of money worth mentioning. I suspect they must […]
Given how sequel-mad Universal studios was in the wake of 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, cranking out two Frankensteins, one of which was also a Wolf Man, a whole carload of mummy pictures, and hell, even a few Invisible Man follow-ups, it seems almost absurd that it took until 1943 to finally produce a second sequel […]
It seems like just about every prominent fairy tale was at least briefly considered to be the follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, even before it was clear that the Disney Studios would survive that film’s anticipated box office failure. Of course, when Snow White instead proved to be one of the great […]
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what desperation looks like. By 1943, the steam was mostly out of the second phase of Universal horror movies, even in their new cheaper, B-picture incarnation, and if the cycle was going to keep on going, something bold and splashy had to be done, for then as now movies made […]
There are so many reasons to hate Oscar season – the intensely patronising time of year when studios clump all of their prestige-style movie into an increasingly small number of weeks just prior to New Year’s Eve – but the one that is especially annoying to me right now is the way that the distributors […]
There’s a long way to go over the next 45 days and 72 years of movie history; and I hope you’ll forgive me if I start it off with a bit of scene-setting before the review itself, even though the story I’m about to tell is extremely well-known. Walter Elias Disney had a perfectly American […]
A number of different factors all contributed to the massive collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema almost exactly at the moment that the 1970s became the 1980s, and the last completely vital epoch in American filmmaking came to its crashing end. Not a very happy state of affairs for the historically-minded cinephile to contemplate, but […]
Part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies When word came out that there was going to be an Italian horror film-a-thon, I made two decisions instantly: 1) I was going to be part of it; 2) I wasn’t going to review a giallo. Not that I don’t love gialli. But I […]
Along comes World War II, and all of a sudden you can’t sink too much time and effort and especially money into making a movie anymore; certainly not an epic-scale monster movie. And thus it was was that 1941’s The Wolf Man, though itself a film riddled with small signs of cheapness, would be the […]
The completion of what is threateningly being referred to as the “second trilogy” of Saw films, Saw VI is a triumph (a very relative triumph) for two reasons: first, it is not so bullshit confusing as Saw IV, and second, it is not so sleepy and wholly pointless as Saw V, and hehehe, I just […]
