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 […]
mod
Posted inArts & Culture
FBI Code 98
No matter, really; I loved it all the same, so much so that I wish it had birthed a series of big-screen outings. (Instead, the idea eventually was rejiggered (sort of) into the long-running Efrem Zimbalist TV show, The FBI, and that doesn’t count.) Directed by Leslie H. Martinson (1966’s Batman: The Movie), the black-and-white, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Fast Company / Fast and Loose / Fast and Furious
For the record, the titles in question on this single-disc set from Warner Archive are Fast Company, Fast and Loose and Fast and Furious. Don’t let that third title make you believe they’re about racing cars; they’re not. They are about finding books. And that may be why neither you nor I have heard of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Mad Magician
Just as he’s about to hit the big time with his super-secret buzz-saw trick, however, his show gets axed and his boss claims proprietary rights to all of Gallico’s stage tools. As all mad magicians as wont to do, Gallico snaps and kills the guy by — and this fits the theme — decapitation via […]
Posted inMusic
Dollar for the Dead
Estevez is a cowboy everyone refers to as Cowboy — a deliberate nod to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name of Sergio Leone’s beloved Dollars trilogy. The rootin’-tootin’ sharpshooter partners with greasy Confederate soldier Dooley (William Forsythe, The Rig), who possesses one-fourth of a map that will lead them to treasure. Only former NFL star/Radio […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Perry Mason Mysteries: The Original Warner Bros. Movies Collection
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 […]
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 inArts & Culture
Drive-In
(How meta it would’ve been to see this at an actual drive-in; I’ll settle for its DVD debut from Sony Pictures’ Choice Collection, rather than the alternative, which is to never see it at all.) Like American Graffiti three years before it, the movie follows a select handful of youngsters, mostly teens, over the course […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Chapman Report
Based on a novel that itself was based on Alfred Kinsey’s landmark, controversial survey of human sexuality, The Chapman Report — now on MOD DVD from Warner Archive — dramatizes the data-collection efforts of Dr. Chapman (Andrew Duggan, It’s Alive) and his assistant, Paul Radford (Efrem Zimbalist, TV’s The FBI) in one particularly prosperous California […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Liquidator
Rod Taylor (The Birds, Hotel) is Boysie Oakes, a mistaken wartime hero with a silly name, whom the Secret Service hires as an assassin. The joke is that not only does Oakes not want to become Agent L, but he doesn’t have the stomach to harm a fly. “No more romping around the mulberry bush: […]