Take a historical trip through the blaxploitation films of the ’70s with Afros, Macks & Zodiacs, Something Weird Video’s 90-minute collection of these flicks’ coming attractions, all laden with shooting, loving and waka-waka guitar strumming. With the VHS tape’s release at the dawn of blaxploitation’s Tarantino-fueled resurgence in the late 1990s, Something Weird was well … Continue reading Afros, Macks & Zodiacs (1995)
Rather famously, producer Dino De Laurentiis lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the late ’80s dropping bomb after bomb through his then-new De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Among DEG’s epic critical and commercial failures? The too-late sequel King Kong Lives, the James Clavell adaptation Tai-Pan and the garbage-bag gimmickry known as Million Dollar Mystery. As … Continue reading Collision Course (1989)
When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the … Continue reading Silver Bullet (1985)
In the Jules Verne adaptation The Fabulous Journey to the Centre of the Earth, one word in the Spanish production’s title is grossly inaccurate. Can you guess which? After acquiring a map purported to share the whereabouts of you-know-what, Professor Otto Lindenbrock (Kenneth More, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw) embarks on a mission to you-know-where, … Continue reading The Fabulous Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1977)
If the Vanessa Morgan-edited (and highly recommended) When Animals Attack: The 70 Best Horror Movies with Killer Animals were your Intro 101 to the naughty-nature subgenre, consider Dominic Lennard’s Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies the subsequent AP class. Part of SUNY Press’ Horizons of Cinema series (as was Lennard’s Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The … Continue reading Reading Material: Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies