But curiosity is curiosity, and interest is interest, so when Warner Archive issued an MOD DVD set of them in Perry Mason Mysteries: The Original Warner Bros. Movies Collection, I just had to check it out, your honor. Warren William (who also played another famous detective, Philo Vance, for the big screen) stars as the […]
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Posted inArts & Culture
Frankenstein
And, in the early ’90s, he starred as the mad doctor in Frankenstein … for TNT, not Kenneth Branagh. Provided you missed it on during its CableACE Award-nominated broadcast, the better-than-average production is now alive — alive! — on MOD DVD from Warner Archive. Bergin’s Dr. Frankenstein is even more enterprising than in the Mary Shelley […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Phynx
To review the movie, I need only tell you what it’s about. The dictator of communist Albania has swiped dozens of United States “world leaders,” including Butterfly McQueen, Johnny Weismuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, Dorothy Lamour, Xavier Cugat, Col. Sanders, Busby Berkeley, the Bowery Boys, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. (Mind you, all of them appear as […]
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The Sorcerers
Explains the Monserrats to a complete stranger (Ian Ogilvy, TV’s Return of the Saint) they’ve secured in what looks like an electric chair, the couple has devised a scientific system offering “complete abandonment with no thought of remorse … intoxication with no hangover, ecstasy with no consequence.” (To the viewer, this means a sequence of […]
Posted inMusic
The Wrath of God
As Father Van Horne, Mitchum is part of a small group of non-natives “recruited” by the local military to kill the ruthless leader Thomas De La Plata (Frank Langella, Unknown) in order to end the senseless killing he orders. For doing so, Father and friends (including burly Victor Buono from TV’s Man from Atlantis) are […]
Posted inMusic
The Five Man Army
The multiculti cast is led by Peter Graves as The Dutchman. For someone who grew up on multiple viewings of Airplane!, seeing Graves as a badass outlaw is something of a trip. At the time, he was about midway through his run on TV’s Mission: Impossible, and like that long-running series, Five Man Army finds […]
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Sitting Target
Oh, and she’s preggo. It’s not his. That revelation causes Harry to bust through the glass that separates them so he can get his paws around her neck. It’s an indication that this not-so-ordinary crime tale intends to do the same to audiences. In its day, I’m sure it did, being the first British film […]
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Hercules, Samson and Ulysses / The Slave / Sandokan the Great
The appeal of 1963’s Hercules, Samson and Ulysses is right there in the title, or as the trailer puts it with caps-lock hyperbole, “THE 3 OF THEM — TOGETHER!” Here, Pietro Francisci, director of the 1958 Steve Reeves smash Hercules, marries the mythical with the biblical in joining Hercules (not Reeves, but Kirk Morris, Hercules Against the […]