There was a TV movie made in 1973, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, that is frequently cited by those who’ve seen it, as one of the best made-for-TV movies of that era, one of the two Golden Ages of made-for-TV movies (the other is the early ’50s). I haven’t seen nearly enough of the […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: movies about rattly old houses that may or may not host an assortment of disturbed ghosts or other paranormal […]
The last of the four films in the Hellraiser series to be released theatrically, Hellraiser: Bloodline begins just about as inauspiciously as any film possibly could: over some painfully generic opening credits (not that any Hellraiser picture has enjoyed tremendously imaginative credits, mind you), we hear a piece of music that sounds a little bit […]
There is no doubt that A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More are good, even top-notch Westerns. Certainly, lesser movies have remained classics for longer, and if Sergio Leone had never put his name to another film after 1965, I have little doubt that we – by which I primarily mean Western […]
I will say this on behalf of the beleaguered remake Conan the Barbarian: it earns the heck out of its R rating. More blood spilled in more thoughtfully creative ways than you’re apt to see outside of a torture film, and topless women – oh! so many topless women! – there are no fewer than […]
Technically, 1985’s Red Sonja, one of the key films in the disintegration of the sword & sorcery genre, is not at all a Conan the Barbarian film. And technically, it isn’t based on the writing of Robert E. Howard, Conan’s creator. The character of Red Sonja in fact made her debut in 1973, in the […]
Insofar as remaking any given 1980s horror film can be rightly said to make sense, it still doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to remake 1985’s Fright Night, a self-conscious throwback whose charms are largely a function of its position in history: it is an attempt to make an old-fashioned, embarrassingly so, […]
Two important facts: one is that Conan the Barbarian made a whole lot of money in 1982, and kicked off a new subgenre, the sword & sorcery film, that was for a few years the genre film of choice in English-speaking parts; the other is that Conan the Barbarian was produced under the aegis of […]
It was undoubtedly too much to hope that a horror movie as idiosyncratic as Hellraiser would end up producing one good sequel after another, especially given its perch at the end of the 1980s. In fact, it was already too much to hope that Hellraiser would have been able to produce even one good sequel, […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the remake of Conan the Barbarian introduces a new generation to the pop hero of Weird Tales, one of […]
One can devote a lifetime to studying the Italian B-movie industry and still never fail to be awestruck by how majestically crude it could be at its most mercenary. The rule there, as everywhere else in commercial cinema has always been that success begets imitation, but while any American hack producer, name-your-favorite Roger Corman wannabe […]
In 1961, Sergio Leone cast an actor from an American TV Western in one of his movies. The actor was Rory Calhoun, and the movie was The Colossus of Rhodes. In 1964, he again cast an actor from an American TV Western in one of his movies. The actor was Clint Eastwood, and the movie […]
