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Stuff to look at: Imiri Sakabashira.
It’s been an age since I’ve done any posts focussed on art or design here, but given that I’ve not really had any time to write about movies during the past few weeks (believe it or not), here for your...
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Horror Express: Series Intro.
No real explanations needed here I hope, but in case anyone was disappointed to discover that I’m not publishing an extended series of posts dedicated to everyone’s favourite ‘Cushing & Lee meet...
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Horror Express: The Haunted House of Horror (Michael Armstrong / Gerry Levy,...
If you’ve read around the history of British horror a bit, chances are you’ll already be familiar with the convoluted background of this singularly ill-starred production, but nonetheless, it’s...
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Horror Express: It! The Terror From Beyond Space (Edward L. Cahn, 1958)
If the fact that much of the first half of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original script for Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ was borrowed from Mario Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) has been widely...
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Thoughts on… Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018)
1.Having initially approached it with a certain amount of trepidation, I finally took a deep breath and watched this one a couple of weekends ago. Long story short, I needn’t have worried. ‘Dragged...
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Krimi Casebook: The Hunchback of Soho (Alfred Vohrer, 1966)
There’s nothing quite like movies which present a mythic/fantastical/completely absurd take on places quite near to where you live, is there? (“Have you seen ‘The Hunchback of Soho’?”, “Seen ‘im? I...
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Exploito All’Italiana: Paganini Horror (Luigi Cozzi, 1989)
You don’t need a PhD in Italian cinema to realise that the nation’s commercial film industry was in pretty dire straits by the tail end of the 1980s. Simply watching a few of the increasingly cynical...
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Kaiju Notes: Son of Godzilla (Jun Fukuda, 1967)
FEATURING:Godzilla!Minira!Kumonga, the giant spider!A bunch of giant Praying Mantises! 1.Ok, let’s begin with a quick show of hands. Who here has seen the original, 1933 ‘King Kong’? Yes, just as I...
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Gothic Originals: The Virgin of Nuremberg (Antonio Margheriti, 1963)
(AKA ‘Horror Castle’, ‘The Castle of Terror’, ‘Das Schloss des Grauens’, etc.)When ploughing my way through the canon of ‘60s Italian gothics a few years back, I overlooked this early effort from...
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Noir Diary # 10: Storm Fear (Cornel Wilde, 1955)
The directorial debut of tormented-leading-man turned tough-guy-auteur Cornel Wilde, ‘Storm Fear’ (adapted from a book of the same name by the otherwise little-known Clinton Seeley) is to some extent a...
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Weird Tales: The Evil Eye by Boileau & Narcejac (Four Square, 1961)
Before being subsumed into our dearly beloved New English Library at some point in the 1960s, paperback imprint Four Square published a wide variety of interesting stuff, including a lot of obscure...
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Deathblog: Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)
(Cross-posted with Stereo Sanctity.)Of course we knew this day would come, but still.So, let’s get straight to the point here – Morricone IS film music, so far as I’m concerned. Even if he didn’t...
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Lovecraft on Film: From Beyond (Stuart Gordon, 1986)
I.“That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic...
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Lovecraft on Film Appendum: Cthulhu Sex Magazine.
In the past, I’ve tried to follow up each of my Lovecraft on Film post with a brief supplementary post, either highlighting some ephemera related to the recently reviewed film or showing off some scans...
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Deathblog: John Saxon (1936-2020)
‘Rock, Pretty Baby’ (1956)with Letícia Román,‘The Girl Who Knew Too Much’ (1963)with Fernando Poe Jr and a bunch of other dudes, ‘The Ravagers’ (1965)with Bruce Lee, ‘Enter the Dragon’ (1973)with Jim...
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Book & Film: Night Moves by Alan Sharp (Warner Paperback Library, 1975)
Strange artefacts from an era before home video allowed viewers to return to their favourite movies at their leisure, movie novelisations (as opposed to tie-in editions of pre-existing source novels,...
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Lovecraft on Film: The Curse (David Keith, 1987)
After Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna reignited the possibilities for commercially viable Lovecraftian cinema with Re-animator and From Beyond, the late ‘80s and early ‘90s saw, if not exactly a flood,...
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Noir Diary # 11: T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)
Whilst I’m sure that more learned film scholars than I must have addressed this issue at length in books I haven’t read, it’s fairly clear that the initial, early ‘40s, iteration of Hollywood Film Noir...
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Random Paperbacks: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Pocket Books, third...
I have mixed feelings about the cover to this late ‘50s/early ‘60s U.S. paperback edition of ‘Red Harvest’. On the one hand, Harry Bennett’s illustration is clearly a great piece of pulp cover artwork,...
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Lovecraft on Film: The Unnamable (Jean-Paul Ouellette, 1988)
“The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty: no freedom – we can see that from the architectural and...
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