These days, the kind of movies that once were made quickly and cheaply for the drive-in circuit are given big budgets and A-list stars. It no longer seems strange that an actor of Liam Neeson’s stature is turning up in something like Taken 2, a formulaic action-revenge movie. But back in the heyday of drive-in […]
Released simultaneously with the Andy Milligan double-bill Nightbirds and The Body Beneath, the BFI Flipside edition of Ian Merrick’s The Black Panther (1977) resurrects an essentially lost British film which suffered a quick death because it took as subject something too raw for British audiences (or at least the British press) to tolerate. Merrick had […]
There’s far more stuff in the world than any of us can ever have complete first-hand knowledge of, so we often have to rely on second- and third-hand information about things we haven’t yet encountered. This leads to a tendency to form opinions about things we actually know nothing about … and judging by a […]
Even with the tens of thousands of movies released on DVD since the format debuted in the late ’90s, vast amounts of film history remain untouched. Of course, home video has always been a commercial enterprise, the preservation and dissemination of history mostly a by-product. Companies with large back-catalogues of titles have been constantly faced […]
It’s 1979 and blithely charming narcissist Rex Romanski (Michael Reed) spots sultry Rita Marie (Ruth Sullivan) across the disco floor. Dancing inevitably leads to hot sex and they meet up at the club again the next night. But Rex’s eye is already roaming and he makes contact with the woman of his dreams, pornstar Amoreena […]
Procrastinating over several reviews I should be writing, I sat down to watch a cheap exploitation double bill last night: Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes: Part 2 (1985) and Alan Birkinshaw’s Killer’s Moon (1978), both recently issued on Blu-Ray by Kino Lorber. The Hills Have Eyes: Part 2 (Wes Craven, 1984) Hills is Craven’s […]
If anything, my viewing seems to be becoming more random these days. I mean to apply some order to what I watch – to view the new Silent Naruse set from Criterion Eclipse, or the Columbia Sam Fuller Collection from two years ago which I recently got hold of – but there are so many […]