Written and directed by Miles Doleac (The Dinner Party), this is a story all about a young history professor who heads off to a new university where he finds that no one cares — not the students, not his department chair and, well, hopefully his new love interest cares. And hey — William Sadler is in it!
Beyond writing and directing this, Doleac also produced and stars in the film. He did well casting Sadler, who has been great in everything I’ve ever seen him in. This is a good opportunity for him to do more than he usually does, which is very nice to see.
You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi. Thanks to its PR company for letting us know it was coming out.
Many know Blake Edwards’s 1982 film and the 1995 Broadway production, but few have seen the original 1933 film until now, thanks to this new release by Kino Lorber.
A young woman (Renate Müller) can’t find work as a singer, so she works with a down on his luck actor to revise her act and become a man on stage. Now, Victoria has become Victor, but her life has become even more complicated.
Director Reinhold Schünzel also shot a French-language version of the film as George and Georgette starring Meg Lemonnier and a French cast. Victor Saville directed an English version, First a Girl, in 1935 and there was a West German remake by Karl Anton in 1957. Before the aforementioned Edwards film, there was also the Argentina remake My Girlfriend, the Transvestite.
You can get this on DVD and blu ray from Kino Lorber, along with Mädchen in Uniform, which we covered earlier this week. It comes complete with commentary by film historian Gaylyn Studlar. They sent us a copy and it’s well worth adding to your collection. It taught me that even though I think I know something about film history, there is also something new to discover.
Originally known as The Surreal Project, this Hungarian film has been retitled and released here in the U.S. by Wild Eye.
It’s all about a family that inherits a painting that is possessed by the demon known as The Whispering Man. You know what happens next: they get rid of the painting, roll credits.
I’m kidding. We wouldn’t have movies if people did what was logical.
Inspired by the films of M. Night Shyamalan, József Gallai made Hungary’s first found footage movie, Bodom. That’s a genre he has made several films in, including A Guidebook to Killing Your Ex. He has another film that Wild Eye has picked up, Spirits in the Dark, and is working on a movie called The Poltergeist Diaries with Eric Roberts.
While the found footage genre isn’t for me — paging B&S About Movies writer Paul Andolina — there are others who will enjoy this.
The Whispering Man is now available on demand and on DVD.
This is the first full-length film by Nacho Vigalondo, whose work also appears in the anthologies The ABCs of Death, The Profane Exhibit and VHS: Viral. He’s since made his English-language debut with the Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey-starring Open Windows and was noticed by his films Colossal and Pooka!
He was inspired to make this movie by the comic 2000AD, citing the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons story “Chronocops.”
Somewhere in Spain, a middle-aged man named Hector and his wife Clara are outside when he sees a young nude woman. After his wife leaves to go shopping, he investigates and finds the girl unconscious. Soon, a man in pink bandages stabs him. Hector runs to a building where a scientist warns him of the bandaged man and leads him to a machine that takes him backward one hour in time.
The scientist now refers to our hero as Hector 2, who runs away despite being warned that he must hide. After an accident, his face is damaged and he must wrap it up, turning the white gauze pink. He’s accidentally hit a woman, who is the nude woman he saw before, so he feels compelled to recreate the same scenario that he just saw. This compulsion will drive the story toward several conclusions and overlapping narratives.
I loved the look and feel of this movie, despite how confusion the plot can get. I also absolutely adored the use of Blondie’s “Picture This,” which the director claims sounds happy but is actually very sad. There was a rumor that Cronenberg was going to direct a remake of this with Tom Cruise in the lead, but that was more than a decade ago.
Man, this quarantine is killing me. If my wife wants to watch something, now we watch it. I’ve seen more than a few Tiffany Haddish movies now. Let me share my pain with you.
I put on a strong front in these posts, but trust me, I always get roped in to these movies.
Haddish and Rose Byrne play childhood best friends who are more like sisters. Their makeup company is on the verge of bankruptcy when their get an offer from Salma Hayak’s character, who is obviously going to screw them at the end and try to ruin their friendship.
As basic as this film is, I enjoyed the casting of Jennifer Coolidge and Pittsburgh native Billy Porter. I also really liked another movie by director Miguel Arteta, 2009’s Youth In Revolt, which played with the expectations of teen movies pretty nicely.
Crown International Pictures was an independent film studio and distribution company formed in 1959 by Newton P. Jacobs. They were one of the first franchise distributors for American-International Pictures and like that studio, they specialized in low-budget junk. In other words, perfect movies for the drive-in.
Crown was all over the place in what they put out, so I’ve tried to be just as out there with this list. Please enjoy!
Whatever was hot — science fiction, horror, martial arts, biker and just plain old fashioned exploitation. Crown International Pictures supplied it to drive-ins and grindhouses all over the U.S.
MOVIE 1: Don’t Answer the Phone! (Robert Hammer, 1980): It’s no accident that this was amongst the first movies that we watched on our Drive-In Asylum Double Feature show. Kirk Smith terrorizes, well, everyone that he can, whether it’s in person or over the telephone. I decided to put this first, because if you don’t make it through this one, the rest of Crown’s films are really going to get to you.
MOVIE 2: The Hearse (George Bowers, 1980): This year at New Year’s Eve, this was the movie my father-in-law put on to watch while people drank around him. What a nihilistic pick and what a last memory of 2019, probably the last normal year we’ll have for a while. What is this, a Chuck Mitchell double feature? Yeah. It totally is. That said, this movie may move slow and didn’t fit in with the slasher world of 1980, but it’s still totally worth watching.
MOVIE 3: 9 Deaths of the Ninja(Emmett Alston, 1985): If this evening were just this movie shown four times in a row, you should be so lucky. I unabashedly adore this movie, a bonkers mix of martial arts, Brent Huff from Gwendoline and Sho Kosugi being Sho Kosugi. The opening James Bond ripoff credits should clue you in. This may be the best movie ever made.
MOVIE 4: Sextette(Ken Hughes, 1978): I debated ending this night with The Pink Angels, but I don’t think anyone likes that movie except for me. And while I usually seek to scorch the earth with the movies that I pick, I want more people to actually watch and enjoy this film, which I love in spite of how bad it is.
Want to know more about Crown International? Check out our week of their action films, starting with Kill Point. You can also check out the Letterboxd list of all their releases.
Please! Send us your night of movies! We’d love to see it!
The Hunt has often been a punchline in the emails between this site’s R. D Francis and myself, as we’ve discussed many times how bad the film appeared from trailers and whether or not the controversy was just made up to get rid of a movie that did not appear ready for theaters.
When the COVID-19 epidemic finally pushed this out — anything that is in the can and could be released is being shown — I finally got my chance to see just how bad — or good — this movie was.
Directed by Craig Zobel — who helped created Homestar Runner — from a script by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, this movie reimagines The Most Dangerous Game for the nightmare hellworld that we find ourselves navigating every day.
The movie was originally called Red State Vs. Blue Stateand so upset President Trump that he referred to it as “”Liberal Hollywood” being “[r]acist at the highest level” and stating, “The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos”, and “They create their own violence, and then try to blame others.”
Nobody cared.
I mean, this is a movie that has Sturgill Simpson play a character named Vanilla Nice. That’s the extent of its humor. And the idea that perhaps there’s no right side in this war is pretty much wasted so that Betty Gilpin and Hilary Swank can have a fifteen-minute fistfight.
The whole beginning of this movie feels less like a film and more like watching someone else play PUBG, with numerous deaths happening with no consequences or emotions.
It’s closer to a slasher, some would say, but most slashers are entertaining.
Imagine if The Purge, but remove all the over-the-top ridiculousness and square up reel moralizing — as well as most of the fun — and you have this movie.
Look, Hard Target, Turkey Shoot and Surviving the Game are already much better cover versions than this. They just didn’t have a ton of money behind them and all manner of hype that they didn’t deserve.
A butcher and his twin sister have gone to Australia to find their birth mother, but what they end up finding is a small town that has a carnivorous — and yes, cannibalistic — secret. Two Heads Creek lets you know that it’s a quality, fun romp right from the beginning with great credits and well-done camerawork. This is no basic straight to streaming time waster.
I’d never heard the Skyhooks song “Horror Movie” before, but this 1975 Australian song is featured throughout the movie and really sets the tone.
The end of this movie has more spraying blood and gore than the last four or five movies I’ve seen put together, as an Australia Day celebration goes the way of Two Thousand Maniacs.
You can grab this release — from the Horror Collective — on all streaming platforms. If you want to learn more, visit the official site.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie to review, but that has no impact on what we think of it.
Directed by Stuart Paton, this was the first attempt at ever filming Jules Verne’s novel. It also includes elements of his story The Mysterious Island. It was also the first motion picture filmed underwater, which was the role of the Williamson Submarine Film Corporation in the Bahamas. While they did not use actual underwater cameras, they instead made a system of watertight tubes and mirrors that shot reflected images of underwater scenes that they staged in shallow waters that were brightly it by the sun. It’s a pretty amazing magic trick.
Adding to the history of this movie, it was made by The Universal Film Manufacturing Company, which eventually became Universal Pictures. While they weren’t a major player yet, they still raised the money for the movie’s special effects, on-location shooting, huge sets, exotic costumes, fully-built ships and a life-size staging of the surfaced Nautilus. In all, this took two years to make and cost the studio $500,000 (which would today be about $19 million dollars). That cost — which kept the film from making any money — kept studios from making another Verne film for more than a decade.
38 years later, when Disney remade this movie, they came to the exact spot in the Bahamas. That’s because the water was so clear that it made for a perfect shooting location.
If you’d like to own this piece of history, it’s just been released by Kino Lorber on blu ray. It also has commentary by film historian Anthony Slide. I loved every minute and I have a feeling that you will, too.
Also known as Vivre Pour Survivre and Le Diamant, White Fire is a movie that is crazy from literally first few moments of the movie, where Bo and Inga (soon to be played by Robert Ginty from The Exterminator and Belinda Mayne from Alien 2: On Earth) watch as their father is burned up by a flamethrower and their mother shot in the back. Fast-forward a few decades and now they’re jewel thieves who are after White Fire, a diamond so hot that it sets people on fire when they grasp it. Oh yeah — they have the hots for each other.
I can’t even begin to explain the story of this movie, where Bo recreates his soon-to-be dead sister by having a prostitute get plastic surgery so that he can finally sleep with his sister, I mean, get revenge. The only trouble is that this new sister is wanted by Noah Barclay (Fred Willaimson!), who has to take her back for his boss.
This is the kind of movie that randomly throws a chainsaw fight in ten minutes in and you wonder, how can this top that? And it does. Again and again, it does, including diamond mine workers who have accessorized leather belts straight out of the disco era. Even better, Mirella Banti (Tenebre, D’Amato’s Top Model 2) is a completely heartless villain.
Gordon Mitchell is here, which makes sense, seeing as how this film — like many of the Eurospy movies he was in — is a United Nations-like effort, uniting Turkey, Italy, France and America to make one of the oddest films that has graced by blu ray player in a while.
Director Jean-Marie Pallardy was a male model before becoming a director. I love how his credit is his signature, as if this was going to be something classy. Then I remembered that Harry Novak did the same exact thing. Most of Pallardy’s work was in the soft core genre, but seriously, the dude is a maniac. This movie is fetishy as hell.
And check out this theme song by Limelight.
Arrow’s new release of this film is pretty much perfect, with a 1080p high def version of the movie, interviews with the director, editor Bruno Zincone and Williamson, and commentary by Kat Ellinger.
This gets my highest recommendation. Please watch this movie — where Turkish oil wrestling is background noise and not even a highlight — so we can discuss just how out of control it is.
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