i used to watch The Man from UNCLE TV series regularly as a kid. It was an unashamed American James Bond knock-off, featuring spies Robert Vaughn and David McCallum in a new adventure each week. Cheaply made, and largely forgettable plot-wise, it had some decent chemistry between the leads, some fun gadgets and a few…
The Big Heat
Fritz Lang’s 1953 crime thriller is now considered one of the classic film noirs. The movie stars Glenn Ford as a homicide cop. Plus, there’s an early role for Lee Marvin as a heavy who, in the movie’s most famous scene, throws a pot of boiling coffee in his moll Gloria Grahame’s face, badly scarring…
Chariots Of Fire
“The British are coming!” So claimed the screenwriter rather arrogantly onstage after winning his Oscar for Chariots Of Fire. Actually, they weren’t. Goldcrest, the UK studio which produced Chariots Of Fire subsequently lost a ton of money on director Hugh Hudson’s unmitigated disaster follow-up Revolution, starring Al Pacino. As a 20 year old I actually…
Shivers
Shivers was the first David Cronenberg movie to put him on the map as the master of ‘body horror’. It has a lot of his tropes in place – a chilly Canadian setting, weirdly named mysterious doctors, and a fair selection of truly gross-out moments (see his later Rabid, Scanners etc). The movie was also…
Batman
“Duh duh duh duh duh….Batman!” As a kid, I used to love watching the Adam West 1960s TV series. I was a superhero comic book fan, and this was the first – indeed only – onscreen superhero. No matter that the Zap! Wham! Kapow! titles were unbelievably cheesy and the villains incredibly silly – it…
The Enforcer (2)
I’ve already posted about the Humphrey Bogart film of the same name, but this Enforcer was the third in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series. It’s an ok movie, but not a patch on either the original or the first sequel Magnum Force. This was the point at which the Harry movies started to become formulaic…
A Day At The Races / Go West
I’ve not seen any Marx Brothers movies in years, but I used to love them when they came on TV. Above is a Spanish herald for arguably their best and most famous movie, A Day At The Races. This was the even more successful follow-up to their hit A Night At The Opera, and featured…
Black Sabbath
I’ve never seen Mario Bava’s 1963 Black Sabbath, save for a YouTube clip of the bizarre end sequence – in which Boris Karloff rides off on a horse through the trees, only for the camera to pull back and reveal him to be on a prop horse in the studio, with the ‘trees’ created by…
Zombie / The Beyond
Italian director Lucio Fulci gets a lot of love amongst gore fans, but I must admit I don’t get it. The only movie of his I have managed to sit through is his pseudo Dawn Of The Dead sequel Zombie aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters etc. Years ago, this one got banned in…
Dirty Harry
“Do I feel lucky…?” Well, I was very happy to win this one earlier this year at auction. Dirty Harry is not only one of my fave Clint Eastwood movies its also one of my all-time fave thrillers, period. It spawned 4 sequels, each of which upped the ordance whilst removing any of the moral…