Fri, Oct 30, 2009
Imagine waking-up in an English hospital after having eye surgery to discover the world's population had been ravaged by unstoppable flesh-eating monsters. And if that's not a bad enough way to start the day, there lurks a terror from beyond at the bottom of the garden path. No doubt some of you out there with shorter memories are thinking "Good lord, Nigel's going to screen 28 Days Later!" Well, you'd be half-right - the "Good lord, Nigel's going to screen..." half. Director Danny Boyle told me he was inspired to make 28 Days Later in 2002 after watching tonight's gold-class presentation. So get your green thumb out of your arse as we don our gardening gloves and grab the popcorn sprinkled with weed-killer, sit back and relax as we absorb by osmosis the 1962 science fiction flick-tease The Day Of The Triffids.
Fri, Dec 9, 2011
by John Llewellyn Moxey starring Christopher Lee and Valentine Dyall. It may not be a masterpiece, but it's definitely a gem worth discovering. Horror Hotel has been compared to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho due to some structural similarities. Both films begin by establishing an attractive young blonde as the primary character, leading the audience to assume that she'll be the protagonist for the remainder of the story. In both films, the blonde travels to a isolated location and checks into a motel run by an eccentric manager. Furthermore, both films were made the same year.
Fri, Jun 20, 2008
by Fritz Bottger starring Alex Darcy and Barbara Valentine. From the poor black and white photography, horrendous dubbing, low-grade production values, completely idiotic characters, stock footage padding, Z-grade monster effects and sheer schlock factor, this movie is seemingly loaded with all the proper ingredients for a true cinematic train wreck. Yet, for some truly inexplicable reason, I find it not only watchable but strangely, and dare I say disturbingly, enthralling as it unfolds.
Fri, Oct 23, 2009
by Alfonso Brescia starring John Richardson and Yanti Somer. The story is lame, the acting is terrible, the dubbing is worse, and there are more minor characters than a Charles Dickens novel. One of the major problems with War Of The Planets is the huge number of throw-away characters who shuffle anonymously across the screen to their inevitable doom. As with many Italian films from this era, everyone in this movie is actually speaking English, but their accents were so thick that the dialogue was re-dubbed by voice actors so it would be understandable. This practice was so common, when Mad Max was re-dubbed for American audiences a lot of people thought it was an Italian production.