Series: Film / TV

The Machine Girl directed by Noboru Iguchi

I am very pleased to report that Japanese special FX master (and occasional director) Yoshihiro Nishimura is now a very solid 3 for 3 with me. In 2001’s Suicide Club, Nishimura’s splattering gore FX gave this ultimately bewildering story just the visceral shocks needed to put it over. In 2008’s Tokyo Gore Police, which saw Nishimura also taking the reins of director, his gore FX entered the realm of high art, with many characters transformed into gushing, human blood geysers and sanguinary fountains.

Who Can Kill a Child? Directed by Narciso Ibanez Serrador

In the 10/27/66 episode of Star Trek, the one entitled “Miri,” Capt. Kirk & Co. beam down to a planet on which all the adults have long since expired, and only feral children reign. Well, although taken from a wholly different source, a similar setup can be found in the surprisingly excellent Spanish horror film Who Can Kill a Child? (1976). But while a planet-wide virus was to blame for the extinction of the adults in the classic Star Trek story,

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;

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.