The former, perhaps better-known as Hospital Massacre, comes from the age where you not only could smoke inside a medical center, but could rest a nationwide release on the shoulders of a Playboy personality — in this case, Barbi Benton. She plays Susan, a beautiful divorcée who goes to the hospital to hear her results […]
films
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Detention of the Dead / The Demented
Imagine if zombies invaded The Breakfast Club. That’s literally the setup experienced by your stock-character students of the nerd, the jock, the misfit, the bully, the cheerleader and, so it’s not a total copy of the 1985 John Hughes classic, a wisecracking Asian kid (Justin Chon, 21 & Over) to spout things like, “I gotta […]
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Coming attractions
Photo: Mark Hancock One such business was the legendary Winchester Drive In Theatre, 6930 S. Western, made all the more poignant by it being one of the few operating drive-in movie theaters left in the country. Instead of shutting its doors, however, longtime owner and operator Lindy Shanbour chose to rebuild. “I opened this drive-in […]
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The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love — Robert K. Elder
Luckily for Elder and his readers, there’s plenty more. A companion of sorts to Elder’s 2011 book The Film That Changed My Life, the Chicago Review Press paperback operates on several levels, from learning tool to reference guide to Netflix queue-filler. As with the earlier work, the author leans on 35 directors to build its […]
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Mad Max Trilogy
The first film introduces future cop Mad Max Rockatansky and director George Miller’s violent, pedal-to-the-metal world of carmageddon. Its chase sequences are as exciting as anything the action genre had seen, and they still hold up because their influence is ever-present. While Max’s family life slows the middle, it fuels a bang-up final act of […]
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dead again
Computer ChessJust in case there was any doubt that fashions and haircuts of the early 1980s were mighty ugly, the time capsule Computer Chess is a solid reminder. Writer-director Andrew Bujalski, in his use of antiquated cameras and technology that could make a TRS-80 look cutting-edge, evokes the period in gloriously fuzzy black and white. […]
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Sadako 3D
This time, that creepy, crawling girl with the stringy black hair known as Sadako (Ai Hashimoto) comes not through TV sets, but computer and smartphone screens. The cursed VHS tape is now a cursed video clip of a live suicide, and anyone who views it immediately kills himself or herself. Well, anyone except pretty, young […]
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Die! Die! My Darling!
Directed by Silvio Narizzano (Georgy Girl) from a clever script by the ever-reliable Richard Matheson (I Am Legend), Die! Die! My Darling! is now available on DVD through the manufactured-on-demand Sony Pictures Choice Collection. In her final feature role, the Lifeboat buoy Bankhead anchors the film as Mrs. Trefoil, whose son was engaged to married […]
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The Big Boss / Fist of Fury / The Way of the Dragon / Game of Death
The first two, I forever have confused and will continue to confuse with one another. Both are directed by Lo Wei and boast cartoonish credit sequences. But only one includes flying dogs, and that’s The Big Boss (also known as Fists of Fury, plural, to further complicate things). That film has him uncovering a murderous […]
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The Bowery Boys: Volume Two
For this four-disc follow-up to 2012’s set, Warner Archive again mined its vaults for 12 of the Boys’ Poverty Row features. The best way to describe their style is that it comes from the “why I oughta!” school of comedy. I’m unsure if it ever graduated, given exchanges like “How can you read in the […]