A very strange film courtesy of director Curtis Harrington. This film is by turns ambitious, clumsy, inspired, dull, beautiful, ugly, and creepy in atmosphere. Harrington compiles, at times, an epic space adventure that involves our world and the inhabitants of another planet. It seems that Earth has detected an interstellar message that aliens are headed toward our planet to establish a meeting of the races. It is soon discovered that the aliens were waylaid enroute and crashed on the planet Mars. Earth dispatches a rescue mission to assist the downed craft. Our astronauts recover one living specimen but soon regret [More]
Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas” appeared many years before the onslaught of slasher films featuring idiosyncratic, stalking killers. This killer likes to freak out future victims by calling them on the phone and issuing gibberish about his foul intentions. There are many POV impressions from the killer’s vantage point. Victims are dispatched gruesomely and left in their lifeless, idle suspension to hang or sit undiscovered in the sorority house attic where some of the killer’s work unfolds. Many of these motifs we would see again in other films. Plenty of quirky characters inhabit this world and there are a few characters [More]
Actor John Saxon just passed away. I recently watched him in the Clint Eastwood Western, “Joe Kidd”. Nice turn. I will always remember him from “Blood Beach” where he plays a detective assigned to a case of mysterious disappearances at a local beach. He is allowed to utter, completely straight-faced, the immortal riff which borrows from the “Jaws” film legacy about people in his community having difficulty even getting to the water. Classic! A well recognized and respected actor. We are sad to see his passing.