High Praise Before Hammer became possessed by demons from the grave, they experimented with other supernatural horror. This is a particularly good one for the period, employing lots of location shots in the mountains. Those mountains provide two key elements of the story: isolation and Tibetan mystics....
Young Frenchwoman Mathilde searches for the truth about her missing fiancé, lost during World War I, and learns many unexpected things along the way. The love of her life is gone. But she refuses to believe he's gone forever — and she needs to know for sure.
Gluttony One of the hardest things in the world is to stop when you know you should, but the attraction, the romance of your obsession pulls you deeper and deeper into the thing. It happens with big things like love and little things like this film. It...
Two families embark on a pleasant Sunday picnic but manage to run into a variety of issues with their temperamental automobile. Each incident requires repeated exits and reboardings by Laurel, Hardy, their wives and grouchy, gout-ridden Uncle Edgar.
Not Perfect I am in the midst of watching a lot of Laurel and Hardy shorts. I’m amazed at a few things. There are over a hundred. They all use the same gag philosophy, often the same gags. And they range from pretty darn funny to...
The continuing lustful sexual adventures of Hollywood producer Aunt Peg as she tries to continue with financing her latest movie project.
Unfulfilling Classic porn, the kind celebrated in “Boogie Nights,” cannot be avoided if you are serious about studying film. An amazing number of these, mostly from the 70s, have pretty cleverly engineered contexts. It is completely different than the porn of today, where there is no attempt...
Routinely exploited by her wicked stepmother, the downtrodden Samantha Montgomery is excited about the prospect of meeting her Internet beau at the school's Halloween dance.
Variations Yes, this is a simple syrupy tale, childish and cliched with actors of ordinary skill and charm. But I liked it. The oddest thing is that though Disney cannot make decent cartoons any more, they sure have the old fashioned sentimental tale down, stuff from the...
Young Bart Collins lives with his widowed mother Heloise. The major blight on Bart's existence is the hated piano lessons he is forced to endure under the tutelage of the autocratic Dr. Terwilliker. Bart feels that his mother has fallen under Terwilliker's sinister influence, and gripes to visiting plumber August Zabladowski, without much result. While grimly hammering away at his lessons, Bart dozes off and enters a fantastical musical dream.
Green Eggs I watch so many bad films that I’m worn out for any try at campiness. I never recommend films as jokes, and many seemingly bad films are really good ones with bad production values. But this one is such a disaster it deserves all the...
At the start of the First World War, in the middle of Africa’s nowhere, a gin soaked riverboat captain is persuaded by a strong-willed missionary to go down river and face-off a German warship.
Leeches Tom Cruise played an exaggerated version of himself in “Magnolia,” following a tradition set long ago. We liked to believe that the sex sirens we saw in movies the 30’s were really that way in life and probably they were. John Wayne followed, never playing anything...
Richard Hanney has a rude awakening when a glamorous female spy falls into his bed - with a knife in her back. Having a bit of trouble explaining it all to Scotland Yard, he heads for the hills of Scotland to try to clear his name by locating the spy ring known as The 39 Steps.
Step By Step Performances All but two Hitchcock films are cursed by the transcended achievement of those two. So the remainder will always seem pale in comparison while unfairly having elements of those retroactively applied. But I believe that the early Hitchcock was a simply competent filmmaker...
Things aren't looking so good for television clown Banana's career, and the fact that his estranged wife, Suzi, has just been arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, Lily, just serves to compound Banana's despair.
Lost Characters You have a few choices when sitting down to write a story. One of these is to decide what sort of agency your characters have. To my mind, the best storytellers start with a world, a notion of sweeps within that world that creates...
Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue.
Surprised I’m trying to find where film audiences started to accept the mystery as merely a surprise ending. You know that the successful mysteries for many decades were “detective stories” that had very clear rules about how the viewer could outwit the writer and guess, actually...
