Month: October 2016

Vampyros Lesbos directed by Jess Franco

When 17-year-old Spanish actress Soledad Miranda appeared in the 1960 Jess Franco musical Queen of the Tarabin in an uncredited role, little could she suspect that a decade later, while suffering discouragement at her stagnating career (she had appeared in some 30 Continental films in those 10 years and was still far from being a household name), she would be selected by Franco again to appear in the first of a string of star-making, outer pictures. In a director/actress collaboration similar to the one that enabled Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich to create seven wonderful entertainments from 1930 –

The Legend of Hell House directed by John Hough

Although a certain Wiki site lists the existence of 135 haunted-house films — and I’m sure there must be more, with a new one being released, it seems, every few months — the Big 3, for this viewer, have long been 1958’s The House on Haunted Hill, 1963’s The Haunting and 1973’s The Legend of Hell House. The first, a William Castle-directed picture that has long been a baby-boomer favorite, is undeniably scary, although much of the picture’s ghoulish occurrences,

The House at the End of the Street directed by Mark Tonderai

Although actress Jennifer Lawrence had appeared in several television programs and seven theatrical films prior to 2012, few could have foreseen the magnitude of her breakthrough that year. While it is true that critics had praised her work in 2010’s Winter’s Bone, her career was most assuredly catapulted into the stratosphere by a pair of films that bracketed 2012. Bringing to life the Katniss Everdeen character in The Hunger Games, she helped propel that March release to an almost $700 million worldwide gross;