There have undoubtedly been sequels that more thoroughly squandered the glories of a strong original than 1972’s Dr. Phibes Rises Again, though very few that I find more personally irritating. The Abominable Dr. Phibes, from 1971, is a film I greatly cherish, a singular blend of Gothic horror, camp, viciously outré death scenes, dreamily surreal […]
There have been horror movie icons since the 1920s, and naturally enough, every one of them has to have their Very Last Horror Movie. But not a one of them had a grand finale to their time as a star of horror movies like Vincent Price, who was shipped out of the genre in grand […]
I would never have thought of this on my own, but now that I’ve been put in mind of it, it makes perfect sense that American International Pictures and Amicus Productions would team up together. You could never say that they occupy the same spot in their respective ecosystems, because the Hollywood and British film […]
History remembers 1953’s House of Wax as the first big studio film shot in 3-D during that gimmick’s earliest incarnation. History remembers this so well, in fact, that history tends to overlook that House of Wax has perhaps even more significant a claim to fame: it was more or less the movie that first linked […]
The word “gimmick” almost always comes with a certain sneering tone of superiority attached: the suggestion is inherent that a thing was less gimmicky, it would be improved as a result. This is not a hard-and-true relationship. There is, for example, the career of director & producer William Castle, whose film career could not be […]
The first thing worth noting is that Bond parodies and rip-offs were always more successful in Europe than in the United States – not for nothing is there an entire Eurospy subgenre far more robust and long-lived than anything that America or the United Kingdom was able to claim. And thus it was the case […]
I’ve been in a Vincent Price mood lately, and Turner Classic Movies just so happened to come along to scratch that particular itch for me last week, and that is why today and tomorrow are given over to a pair of “Why the hell not?” reviews – something I frankly don’t do enough of, and […]
Hi, my Jewish friends! You didn’t think I was going to leave y’all out of the vaguely-insulting fun, did you? Of course not, and here we are with a film that, by virtue of referencing in somewhat slapdash fashion the ten plagues of Egypt, is the closest thing the world has to a Passover-themed horror […]
The last of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Roger Corman directed for American International Pictures – though by no means the last one that AIP cranked out – The Tomb of Ligeia is the most polished and classy film of the entire cycle, and it is not uncommon to find people arguing, on those grounds, […]
The seventh of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for AIP, The Masque of the Red Death, opened four years and two days after the first, House of Usher, and that is a whole lot of Poe in not very much time no matter how you slice it (and let us pause to observe that […]
“The Haunted Palace” is a great little poem, one of Edgar Allan Poe’s all-time best pieces of verse. Emphasis on little. It’s all of six stanzas long, a total of 48 lines, and its single function is to describe the atmosphere clinging to a palace in a luxuriant valley that was once, generations ago, a […]
It’s a parlor game for 19th Century literature freaks and nothing but to speculate on such questions, but let us take a moment to muse upon the most famous short story written by Edgar Allan Poe – that is, name the first Poe story that comes to mind. Ask a dozen people, and I suspect […]
