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Deathblog: John le Carré (1931-2020)
To my shame, I’ve been a late-comer to John le Carré’s work. Scanning over his books (which have always been gifted by their publishers with singularly boring cover designs) in innumerable charity...
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Best First Time Viewing: 2020. (Part # 1 of 3)
I realise I’ve been pretty late off the mark this year in getting this list underway, but, like a somewhat less aesthetically pleasing version of Anneli Sauli in the above screengrab from Der Hexer,...
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Best First Time Viewings: 2020. (Part # 2 of 3)
I’m sorry once again for the delay in getting this post to you. If you missed it, don’t forget to read part # 1 of this list here.30. Golden Queen’s Commando (Chu Yen-Ping, 1982)Months after viewing,...
View ArticleR.I.P. Todd Stadtman.
Please excuse this brief interruption to our first-viewings countdown, but I need to take a moment to express my great sadness upon learning today (via tribute posts on Teleport City and...
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Best First Time Viewings: 2020. (Part # 3 of 3)
Finally got there! This final instalment turned into a bit of an epic, I’m afraid. (Don’t forget to read parts # 1 and # 2 of this list here and here.)15. The Car (Elliot Silverstein, 1977) I put off...
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Psyched Out Sci-fi: Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny (Star Books, 1978)
A quintessentially mind-blowing exemplar of ‘70s psychedelic SF artwork, the cover for this Star books edition of Roger Zelazny’s 1976 novel ‘Doorways in the Sand’ appears to combine imagery drawn from...
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Noir Diary # 13 / Thoughts on… Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
I. Ever since I decided to start writing up my viewings of ‘40s/’50s Film Noir a couple of years ago, I’ve found myself bedevilled by the question of where, precisely, the boundaries of ‘noir’ lie....
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Deathblog: Norman J. Warren (1942-2021)
Back to the deathblogs yet again, as yesterday morning brought the terrible news that the great Norman J. Warren has passed away at the age of 78. Surely one of the best-loved directors of British...
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Deathblog: Yaphet Kotto (1939- 2021)
And so the bad news just keeps on coming. What a month. Anyone who has read this blog for a while probably knows that I dig Yaphet Kotto. Truth be told, I was only distantly aware of his career when I...
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Gothic Originals: The House of Usher (Alan Birkinshaw, 1989)
One oft-overlooked wrinkle in the history of gothic horror cinema is the inexplicable revival of the form which seemed to take place at the close of the 1980s, nearly 20 years after the subgenre had...
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Noir Diary # 14: Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine, 1954)
Drive a Crooked Road. Now that’s what I call a great film noir title. Is it actually a great film noir movie, though? Well - yes, absolutely, I would argue, although admittedly you’d be hard pressed to...
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Gothic Originals / Exploito All’Italiana: Nosferatu in Venice (Augusto...
The tragedy of ‘Nosferatu in Venice’ is that, under more favourable circumstances, it could so easily have been great.The character of Nosferatu - first seen of course in F.W. Murnau’s 1922...
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Book & Film: The Yakuza by Leonard Schrader (Futura Books, 1975)
A uniquely ambitious U.S./Japanese co-production, heavily promoted by Warner Bros in the apparent belief that the notion of Japanese gangsters could provide them with some kind of post-‘Enter the...
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Pulp Non-Fiction: The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke (Logos Books, 1972)
Naturally the ‘Pulp Non-Fiction’ header on this post should be read with heavy inverted commas, as I suspect that this particular volume rarely ventures within spitting distance of the truth…. but...
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Pulp Non-Fiction: The Satan Trap: Dangers of the Occult edited by Martin Ebon...
A companion piece of sorts to last week’s post on The Satan Seller, I don’t have much to say about this odd hardback - recently liberated from a box of books on its way to the charity shop - which...
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Franco Files: Gemidos de Placer / ‘Cries of Pleasure’ (1982)
OBLIGITORY DISCLAIMER: Readers should be aware that the screengrabs above are NOT sourced from Severin’s 2019 blu-ray edition of ‘Gemidos de Placer’, which I can confirm looks splendid. They originate...
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Noir Diary # 15: The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)
Following the lead of the film itself, let’s start off here by getting the boring bit out of the way: Don Siegel’s ‘The Lineup’ is, technically speaking, a TV spin-off. Also known as ‘San Francisco...
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Weird Tales: Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin (Four Square, 1965 / first...
Though on the face of it this paperback looks to be yet another enticing, horror-adjacent offering from ‘60s New English Library imprint Four Square, readers familiar with Bruce Montgomery aka Edmund...
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Deathblog: Shinichi ‘Sonny’ Chiba (1939-2021)
It goes without saying that I was incredibly sad to learn on Thursday that the great Sonny Chiba (‘Chiba-chan’ to many of his fans in Japan) has passed away at the age of 82, following a ten-day battle...
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Noir Diary # 16: The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)
Even before he achieved card-carrying ‘auteur’ status following his celebrated collaborations with Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey already had a long history of turning genre conventions outside out....
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