The Dead Zone is my favourite of David’ Cronenberg’s movies. At university, I once wrote a dissertation on Cronenberg’s earlier ‘body horror’ movies – including Shivers, Rabid and Scanners. These were all typically set in a Canadian winter and are fundamentally very cold, dour and disturbing movies, with little known casts. They had a pretence…
Rasputin The Mad Monk
This is an interesting example of how different artists can approach the same material. These are both the French ‘grande’ and ‘petit’ posters produced for this Hammer Films melodrama. This 1966 movie isn’t a horror movie per se, but a very loose and sensationalised retelling of historical events at the Russian court. It was shot…
Dune
David Lynch’s 1984 version of Dune is widely recognised to be something of a disaster. The producers probably thought they were investing in the new Star Wars. What they got was weird and incomprehensible beyond belief. Lynch himself subsequently disowned the movie and whilst it has become something of a cult, campy favourite, my memory…
Gunfight In Abilene / Incident At Phantom Hill
Sometimes a movie poster should simply be appreciated as a work of art, irrespective of the qualities of the movie itself. I have never seen either Gunfight in Abilene nor Incident At Phantom Hill and am highly unlikely to ever do so. They are both obscure Westerns from the mid-60s. But I am writing about…
Horror movie books
Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History Of Horror Movies was the first movie-related book I ever bought. This would have been back in the 70s. It was quite instrumental, in retrospect, in me developing a love of movies in general, and horror movies in particular. I still have my copy! Author Gifford shows great affection for…
Farewell My Lovely / The Long Goodbye
Here are a pair of posters for very different interpretations of Raymond Chandler’s classic private eye tough guy Philip Marlowe. The most famous incarnation of Marlowe is of course Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, although former song-and-dance man Dick Powell’s surprisingly tough Marlowe in Murder My Sweet (an adaptation of Farewell My Lovely) runs…
Skyfall
Skyfall is one of my absolute favourite James Bond movies, and my favourite post-Connery Bond by a mile. Having seen this originally in the cinema I subsequently ended up watching it many times on long-haul flights, and it really bears up well to multiple viewings. It is probably the best-looking of all the Bond movies,…
Halloween / Halloween II
The original Halloween was and still is my most terrifying experience in a cinema, for reasons that only partly relate to the film itself. True, John Carpenter’s 1978 original is a masterpiece of horror cinema. He practically invented the whole slasher genre, and unwittingly ushered in a slew of inferior imitations. I saw Halloween…
The Misfits
The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe’s final film, was written for her by her (ex) husband, the great American playwright Arthur Miller. Monroe stars alongside fellow greats Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, and the movie has a poignant sadness about it seeing movie stars past their prime playing characters past theirs, and knowing it too. Gable died…
The Breakfast Club
I saw The Breakfast Club with low expectations when reviewing movies for my student newspaper. It turned out to be one of the classic teen movies of the 80s. It is my favourite from the late director John Hughes, who also gave us teen classics Ferris Bueller and Pretty In Pink, amongst many more. These…