From 1943 to 1950 a terraced house at Rillington Place, Notting Hill, was the scene of up to eight grisly murders by an invoice clerk and part-time volunteer policeman named John Reginald Halliday Christie. Unsuspected by his neighbours, Christie specialized in strangling prostitutes and having some sort of sexual experience in their presence as they [...]
A camel opera or a war story?
They don’t make movies today like the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia. For one thing they’d be too expensive and, for another, too much desert and not enough sex. Actually, there’s virtually no sex whatsoever in Lawrence of Arabia which is fair enough as the real Lawrence is not known [...]
In the century since the Titanic experienced her fatal collision with the iceberg, any theory about the disaster probably has been said. Not to mention the outlandish. It has even been claimed that the White Star liner ran over a prehistoric monster or was sunk by a German U-boat practising for World War One. Some [...]
Not as well known as it should be, Queen of Spades won the 1949 BAFTA award for best British film. Directed by Thorold Dickinson and starring Anton Walbrook – the two had previously worked together on Gaslight made in 1940 – the film is billed as a macabre ghost story even though the supernatural does [...]
Hollywood moviemaker Roger Corman, born in 1926, has four hundred “B” type films to his credit including the 58 he himself directed. The recently produced DVD “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” is a must-see for all those addicts over the past half-century and more who have enjoyed Attack of the Crab Monsters, Demons [...]
Young and handsome, Harold (Bud Cort) falls madly in love with a 79 year old woman Maude (Ruth Gordon) seemingly because both of them enjoy going to other people’s funerals. So there’s little doubt why the 1971 film has become one of the best-known cult movies ever. Indeed, if you look up a category such [...]
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Tobe Hooper’s 1974 low-budget, horror masterpiece has acquired something of a mythical status. Stories have circulated for years about how the first audiences fainted or puked in the aisles. Many people, especially those who have never seen the movie, believe that the graphics were the most awful ever to be shown on [...]
Supernatural revenge or just superstition?
Despite the inherent scariness of their stuffed composites, very few notable scarecrows have secured a place in horror movie history. While Scarecrows (1988) and Night of the Scarecrow (1994) are creditable attempts, the first horror flick with the word in its title is the best: Dark Night of the Scarecrow made [...]
The Premature Burial was most timely
Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1844 short story, cashed in successfully on the Victorian horror of being buried alive. In the nineteenth century, doctors were not always properly qualified, resulting in public panic that unconscious dear ones might be mistaken for having dropped off this mortal coil. There was even [...]
Corruption a thing of the future
by Barry Kenyon
The Blue Lamp, a 1950 British crime film from Ealing Studios, is an everyday story of two London cops whose nightly beat brings them into contact with some desperate young thugs.
Sixty years on, it may appear to show a gentler age with the thin, blue line of honest [...]
