Next SFF Author: Joseph Fink
Previous SFF Author: Gemma Files

Series: Film / TV


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Opera: Caws and Effect

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,


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An Angel for Satan: A winning end to an historic streak

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,


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Magic: Atta boy, Shmucko!

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;


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The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

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.


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Monsters: Some competition for Dagora

Monsters directed by Gareth Edwards

Fortunately enough for me, I first saw Gareth Edwards’ 2010 sci-fi debut, Monsters, as a middle-aged adult, rather than when I was a kid. Decades back, any monster movie that didn’t deliver the titular creature within the first 1/2 hour would invariably leave me very restless; even the great ’50s shocker The Giant Behemoth was pooh-poohed by me back then for withholding its initial glimpse of the film’s radioactive brontosaurus for “too long.” (Hmmm … maybe this partially explains why I STILL consider The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms — in which we see the monster in the film’s first 10 minutes and regularly thereafter — the greatest such film ever created.) So what would I have made of a film like Monsters,


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The Witch-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom: A strange yet oddly forgettable film…

The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom directed by Jacob Cheung

I’m always in the mood for a good wuxia-fantasy, and The White-Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom has everything you’d expect from the genre: a noble hero, a sprawling plot, a number of gravity-defying action scenes, and an enigmatic woman at its heart.

Based on the novel Baifa Monü Zhuan by Liang Yusheng, the story is set in the last days of the Ming Dynasty, a time in which China is threatened by both foreign invaders and internal corruption.


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The Vampire’s Coffin: Does what all good sequels should

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,


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The Vampire: South-of-the-border neck noshing

The Vampire directed by Fernando Mendez

The DVD company known as Casa Negra has managed to impress me yet again. Specializing in Mexican horror films of the classic era of 1956 – ’65, this outfit had previously wowed me with great-looking, extras-packed DVDs of such wonderful films as The Brainiac, The Witch’s Mirror, The Man and the Monster, and especially The Black Pit of Dr. M and The Curse of the Crying Woman (I personally deem that last one a horror masterpiece).


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Voodoo Island: For Uncle Boris completists only

Voodoo Island directed by Reginald LeBorg

The 1957 Boris Karloff film Voodoo Island seems to have a widespread reputation as being one of the actor’s all-time worst, so it was with a feeling of resignation and borderline cinematic masochism that I popped this DVD into the player the other night. Voodoo Island was Karloff’s first horror picture in four years, his only release for 1957; he would rebound a bit the following year, with the releases of the fun shlockfest Frankenstein 1970 and the even better (British) film Grip of the Strangler.


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The Mothman Prophecies: Genuinely freaky

The Mothman Prophecies directed by Mark Pellington

Laura Linney, one of Hollywood’s preeminent mainstream actresses of the early 21st century, made a pair of highly effective horror pictures in 2002 and 2005 that share a number of notable similarities. The Mothman Prophecies, the earlier film, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose, are both products of the Screen Gems/Lakeshore Entertainment production company, and both deal with supernatural events that are purportedly based on real-life incidents. Both films go far in convincing the viewer of the possibility of the bizarre happenings portrayed as being genuine and real (unknowable,


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Next SFF Author: Joseph Fink
Previous SFF Author: Gemma Files

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