Damn you, Scream Queen filmmaker Brad Sykes. Damn you to hell! Do you expect anyone to ever get through your new book, Neon Nightmares: L.A. Thrillers of the 1980s? You’ve made so many of the movies sound so intriguing, one has to stop reading immediately to hunt down and watch the film under discussion before … Continue reading Reading Material: Short Ends 3/18/24
Aside from being a winking pun, The Joy of Sets hasn’t been named willy-nilly. Lee Goldberg’s collection of 11 preview articles, mostly for Starlog, indeed captures the feeling of reading about hotly anticipated movies in the blockbuster excess of the ’80s. One can sense the then-young film obsessive had to have felt with such access … Continue reading The Joy of Sets: Interviews on the Sets of 1980s Genre Movies
Goldberg. Lee Goldberg. The prolific crime novelist began his professional writing career as many scribes do: at the college paper. Whereas I had to report on the facility management department at the University of Oklahoma, Goldberg leveraged UCLA’s ink to write about his first love: 007, if you haven’t guessed by now. The resulting interviews … Continue reading The James Bond Films 1962-1989: Interviews with the Actors, Writers and Producers
About a decade ago, while folding laundry, I watched a fun primetime special about TV shows that, for one reason or another (but mostly because they were bad), never made it past the pilot stage. What I didn’t know at the time was that hour-long special was based on a book! While that 1991 edition … Continue reading The Best TV Shows That Never Were / Television Fast Forward / Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989
Despite sharing a writer/director, several cast members and even the frickin’ typeface for the posters, Kevin S. Tenney’s Witchtrap is not a sequel to Kevin S. Tenney’s Witchboard, as the publicity took great pains to remind prospective viewers. Whatever its parentage, the name matters not/squat; Witchtrap is a fiendishly entertaining example of 1980s horror: not … Continue reading Witchtrap (1989)