Series: Film / TV

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,

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.

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).

Carnival of Souls directed by Herk Harvey

George A. Romero was not the first industrial filmmaker to release a landmark B&W horror picture in the 1960s. Romero, after churning out commercials for TV and those industrial films for Pennsylvania-based The Latent Image, came out with the seminal Night of the Living Dead in ’68, but Herk Harvey had beaten him to the punch by a good six years. Harvey, in 1961, was working for Centron Films in Lawrence, Kansas, also cranking out industrial and educational films, before coming out with a film the following year,