Author: Sandy Ferber

Opera directed by Dario Argento

Numerous friends have tried to get me to appreciate opera over the years; all these many attempts have failed. Call me a philistine if you like, but for me, opera has always meant a fat lady in a Viking helmet yodeling at full blast, or a bearded guy or off-putting prima donna shrilling away in a language that I don’t understand. Thus, it was with a feeling of decided trepidation that I approached Italian director Dario Argento’s 1987 offering, Opera. On the one hand, for this aspiring Argento completist,

An Angel for Satan directed by Camillo Mastrocinque

Although cult actress Barbara Steele appeared in 14 frightening films during the course of her career, the nine Italian Gothic-style pictures that she starred in during the early to mid-’60s are the ones primarily responsible for her current title: the Queen of Horror. Starting with the Mario Bava wonder Black Sunday in 1960, and then on to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, its sequel The Ghost, Castle of Blood, The Long Hair of Death,

Magic directed by Richard Attenborough

A good 13 years before scaring the bejeebers out of audiences by portraying a certain fava-bean-and-human-flesh-eating cannibal, Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins was playing a demented wackadoodle really almost as frightening, in the 1978 film Magic. As far as I can tell, Magic was the sixth film to deal with a ventriloquist and his relationship with an alter-ego dummy (not counting the 1954 Danny Kaye COMEDY Knock on Wood). Lon Chaney had starred in The Unholy Three in 1925 and in its remake of 1930;

The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave directed by Emilio Miraglia

Italian director Emilio Miraglia’s second film, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972), had previously impressed me as one of the most perfect giallo pictures that I had ever seen, when I first saw it six years ago, so I had a feeling that I was going to enjoy seeing his first. But because of that earlier film’s title — The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave — I was somehow expecting something more on the order of a supernatural/ghost story.

The Vampire’s Coffin directed by Fernando Mendez

In the ordinary course of things, a movie sequel begins production only after the original film has proved itself a success at the box office. This, however, was not the case with the sequel to the 1957 Mexican film El Vampiro. Producer Abel Salazar, apparently, felt so confident that his film would be a hit — and it was; tremendously so — that he began work on that picture’s follow-up even before the first one saw the light of day. That sequel,