Plastic Nightmare

During the early years of the VHS boom movie lovers were suddenly able to access hundreds of films they had always wanted to see but weren’t available on TV or had never played movie houses in their town. Many were titles they had only read or heard about from fellow movie buffs. So it is no wonder that VHS became the dominant format in the home entertainment industry for awhile. I certainly credit VHS with introducing me to countless B-movies, forgotten Hollywood pictures and genre films but also introducing me to movies from outside the U.S., especially those from Canada. Among some of my favorites are Circle of Power aka Brainwash aka Naked Weekend (1981), a disturbing drama about a corporate retreat weekend for employees led by a dominatrix-like motivator (Yvette Mimieux); Siege aka Self Defense (1983), in which a small group of people are trapped in an apartment and attacked by crazed vigilantes; Family Viewing (1987), Atom Egoyan’s hypnotic drama about alienation; and Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Guy Maddin’s bizarre debut feature. These were all surprising revelations to me but the one that still haunts me is Pin aka Pin: A Plastic Nightmare (1988).

Continue reading

Basketball Jocks and Pom Pom Girls

Jane Fonda (in her film debut) and Anthony Perkins appear in a publicity still for the 1960 romantic comedy TALL STORY, directed by Joshua Logan.

The film debut of a soon-to-be-major movie star is not always an event of any significance when it first occurs. Nor is it often a movie with any artistic merit that can stand the test of time and become an important topic for analysis among film scholars. Jane Fonda’s movie debut, Tall Story, will surely never make the AFI’s top 100 films list and it wasn’t a commercial or critical success upon its release in 1960. Yet the film is important in the career arc of Ms. Fonda. It’s also an enjoyable, often witty romantic comedy that plays much better today than when it first premiered.

Continue reading

Raymond Burr + Natalie Wood = Cute Couple

You probably couldn’t find a more unlikely friendship in Hollywood during the fifties than the one between Raymond Burr and Natalie Wood but most biographies of Wood document this little-known period of the actress’s life. The 38-year-old actor and the 17-year-old ingenue became close friends and possibly more during the making of A Cry in the Night (1956), in which he played an unhinged stalker and she was his victim.  

Continue reading

Freaking Out in Franco Era Spain

Not all film preservationists are focused on saving and restoring lost classics of silent and early cinema like Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) or overlooked noir indies from Hollywood’s golden era such as Richard Fleischer’s Trapped (1949). Mondo Macabro, which has been around since 2003 or so, is dedicated to introducing movie lovers to fringe cinema from around the world – obscure genre films that run the gamut from horror to sexploitation to art house oddities from countries as far flung as Japan, Latvia and South Africa. Among some of their offbeat releases are Lady Terminator (1989), a cheesy Indonesian rip-off of James Cameron’s The Terminator, The Living Corpse (1967), a vampire thriller from Pakistan, and Strip Tease (1963), a melancholy French drama starring Nico (of The Velvet Underground) with music by Serge Gainsbourg and Alain Goraguer. The company’s most recent release on Blu-Ray, The Killer of Dolls (El asesino de manecas, 1975), is easily one of their most peculiar and transgressive acquisitions to date.  Continue reading

Norman Lloyd: Hollywood’s Long Distance Runner, Part 2

Actor/Director/Producer Norman Lloyd, born 1914.

*This is the second part of a revised and updated version of a Norman Lloyd interview which was first recorded in March 2010 just prior to the actor/director/producer’s appearance at the first Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival.

Here is the link to Part 1: https://cinemasojourns.com/2017/04/09/norman-lloyd-hollywoods-long-distance-runner/     Continue reading