Spooky Film of the Day – Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim/Louis Malle/Federico Fellini, 1968)
Why, what do we have here; a horror anthology film directed by three of the most famous continental film directors of the 50s and 60s? Well, yes… And as you might well expect, Spirits of the Dead is a rather classy affair. Released as Histoires extraordinaires (or “Extraordinary Stories”) in France and [...]
Spooky Film of the Day – The Flesh Eaters (Jack Curtis, 1964)
Did you ever hear about that American Film Institute poll where they voted the Nazis the best movie villains in the history of film? Well, as ever-so-slightly dubious as that is, they’ve sort of got a point… I wonder how many of you will feel a little burst of excitement when I [...]
Spooky Film of the Day – Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (Bob Clark, 1972)
Not just a great title (not to mention sound advice), but a great film too! And one that deserves to be held in similar affection by zombie-lovers as anything by Romero and Fulci. In fact, I would put Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things at number three with a bullet (to [...]
Spooky Film of the Day – Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1982)
Happy Halloween Week everybody! I thought it might be jolly apt to kick things off with a film that was actually set on old Hallows eve itself… Strangely enough however, once you’ve overlooked the bleedin’ obvious, there are surprisingly very few half-decent horror films that take place around Halloween… The bleedin’ obvious being [...]
Film of the Day – Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich,1955)
Film Noir, eh? It almost literally means “dark films”, doesn’t it? And they don’t come much darker than Kiss Me Deadly, that’s for sure… The ultimate in nihilistic Noir, Kiss Me Deadly is lifted from the pages of a novel by legendary pulp scribe Mickey Spillane, and as if the source material wasn’t [...]
Film of the Day – Footprints on the Moon (Luigi Bazzoni, 1975)
Q: When is a giallo not quite a giallo? A: When it’s as strange and beguiling as Footprints on the Moon! It’s not that there aren’t many other giallos that are strange and beguiling, it’s just that today’s Film of the Day is the most atypical and off-the-wall of the lot. Owing less to [...]
Film of the Day – Cobra Verde (Werner Herzog, 1987)
I was watching Doctor Zhivago on telly with my mother one Christmas, the very time of year that innumerable family units across the country settle down to watch that grandoise, historical romance for the umpteenth time. Despite the fact that she had seen it many (many, many) times before, my mum had been previously [...]
Film of the Day – True Stories (David Byrne, 1986)
You might recall I was banging on about musicians appearing in films last month. When I was writing that, erm, piece I decided to limit my selection to include only films in which the rock and pop stars in question played straight acting roles; in other words, only films in which they had been chosen to [...]
Film of the Day – Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)
When we last checked in on Seijun Suzuki, he had just landed himself in some serious trouble with his employers at the Nikkatsu Company film studio. Having already warned the director that his films were getting far too weird, Suzuki offered them Tokyo Drifter, a kaliedoscopic, madcap riot, but also the [...]
Film of the Day – The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985)
The first thing wot I ever wrote for this here website was a little number about dystopian science fiction films. You know the kind I mean; films in which the future is depicted in ultra-pessimistic fashiom, with society having collapsed in on itself in a varying variety of savage post-apocalyptic worlds. Well, an interesting subgenre growing out [...]