Not a Beauty Treatment

It’s not likely that a Poverty Row horror film like The Face of Marble (1946) will ever end up on anyone’s top ten list – unless the category is guilty pleasures – but that’s what distinguishes a movie like this from a title on the AFI approved list of great American classics. A cult movie rarely conforms to conventional standards of what’s good and what’s bad and that’s why The Face of Marble could be a more entertaining and challenging viewing experience than say, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963). For one thing, you need a scorecard to keep track of the anything-goes-plot which ties together failed scientific experiments, reanimated corpses, a blood-drinking ghost dog that can walk through walls, a voodoo-practicing housekeeper and one woman’s hopeless, unrequited romantic obsession with her husband’s young assistant.

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Truckers on Speed

“The Pill Dragnet! Blasting the Blackest Market of all…the girl peddlers of the deadliest thrill for sale!” – one of the taglines for Death in Small Doses (1957).    

In the grand tradition of other B-movie crime expose of the fifties such as Kansas City Confidential (1952), The Phenix City Story (1955), and New Orleans Uncensored (1955), this little known 1957 programmer from Allied Artists (formerly known as poverty row studio, Monogram Pictures) has all the earmarks of a routine, low budget exploitation drama aimed at the drive-ins and double bill grindhouses of its era but it also serves up some surprises and memorably wacko moments for those who think they’ve been down this road before.

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