Completed my Scottish hat trick with Roman Polanski's 1971 adaptation of Macbeth , which contains a great deal more bloodletting than any other Shakespeare adaptation had up to that point. Even so, it seems to be caught halfway between the colorful pageantry of Laurence Olivier's Richard III and the gritty verisimilitude of Monty Python and the Holy Grail , from which it isn't too far ...
All this month, Turner Classic Movies is showcasing the work of a different Great Director (or two) every day. Tonight the spotlight is on Orson Welles, but I got the jump on the channel by watching my own DVD of 1941's Citizen Kane , which still stands as one of the most assured and audacious debuts in motion picture history. Its stylisticinnovations -- such as the use of deep focus ...
Some people have been calling Drag Me to Hell a return to form for Sam Raimi and that's true in the sense that his early films all dealt with a central character who gets put through hell over the course of 90 minutes. The only real difference -- apart from the more substantial budget he had to work with -- is this time he's being completely literal. Written by Raimi and his brother Ivan ...
It's impossible to know what Franco's government thought they were getting when they invited Luis Buñuel to return to Spain after his long, self-imposed exile to make a film, but 1961's Viridiana turned out to be unqualified masterpiece -- and a great embarrassment to the conservative regime that footed the bill for it. No matter how Buñuel's script (written in collaboration with Julio ...
The first Masters of Horror episode I ever saw was Stuart Gordon's Dreams in the Witch-House , which I got in a two-pack with John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns . From the moment I heard about the series I was excited about it, and when I found out Gordon was directing an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story, well, that automatically kicked my expectations up a notch. The fact that it also ...
After last week's supremely disappointing Dance of the Dead I lowered my expectations for Tobe Hooper's second Masters of Horrorepisode, which helped 2006's The Damned Thing immeasurably. Based on a short story by Ambrose Bierce and a teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson, the episode is centered around a small Texas town where some crazy shit happens every couple dozen years or so. ...
After making a name for himself in the Chicago theater scene, Stuart Gordon made the leap to feature films with 1985's Re-Animator , surely one of the most audacious directorial debuts in movie history. Based on H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West, Re-Animator" stories, the film not only announced a major directing talent but also jump-started the Lovecraft movie craze, which had largely been ...
Director Henry Hathaway was an old hand at streetwise film noir by the time he made 1951's Fourteen Hours , in which a confused young man (Richard Basehart) steps out onto a 15th story ledge one morning and then takes his time making up his mind what to do next. It doesn't take him long, though, to decide that the only person he can really trust is down-to-earth traffic cop Paul Douglas, who's...
In the spring of 1995, while I was an exchangestudent in Chester, England, I availed myself of the student film group on a few occasions. One film they showed that I wanted to see but didn't get to because I got the time wrong (and thus missed the first half hour -- a capital offense in my book) was Abel Ferrara's incendiary Bad Lieutenant from 1992, in which Harvey Keitel, fresh off ...
The only western Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott did together that isn't currently available on DVD is 1959's Westbound , and that probably owes more to the fact that it was made for Warner Bros. than it reflects on its quality. Set during the Civil War, the film puts Scott in the role of a Union cavalryman who's taken off the front lines to oversee crucial gold shipments on the Overland ...
