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 company is experimenting with a new retailer format that gets rid of the several racks of DVDs and CDs and as a substitute has stations for MP3 people, laptops, and such, according to Fortune. Each and every station will be manned by Finest Get workers who might turn your tech concerns into income opportunities [...]
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 [...]
by Barry Kenyon
There have been lots of movies about the Titanic, but the 1953 version is unique in its own right. Like the James Cameron 1997 version, the 1953 Titanic focuses on a totally fictitious relationship yet makes no serious attempt to recreate the actual events of the night of April 15, 1912. Nonetheless, the [...]
All aboard for The Ghost Train 1941
by Barry Kenyon
You would never think that the popular night market in Cambodia’s Siem Reap, not far from the Angkor Wat temple complex, would have two DVD shops both offering Arthur Askey’s wartime gem for sale. But you’d be wrong. And selling for one US dollar. “It’s a popular [...]
by Barry Kenyon
It’s fairly obvious that the 1966 spectacular “Khartoum” was tryng to cash on David Lean’s earlier offering “Lawrence of Arabia”. Both movies are about men of action who took on better equipped and much larger adversaries, although it’s true that Khartoum’s hero was killed in the final battle whilst Lawrence had a more [...]
Stand by with the rubber swords
by Barry Kenyon
In the early 1950s, MGM did a triology of medieval action movies with Robert Taylor. The first was the hugely successful Ivanhoe, all about Saxons and Normans, and the last was the somewhat bizarre The Adventures of Quentin Durward which tracked a wandering Scot interfering in French politics [...]
Mildred Pierce one of the best
by Barry Kenyon
The 1945 movie Mildred Pierce, one of the best Hollywood efforts ever, is much more than a high powered soap opera tinged with film-noir. It both reflects and then shatters the American dream – the desperate search for identity and property as the keys to happiness.
The tale started [...]
