Based on the novel by early 19th-century journalist Thomas De Quincy (whom Price plays), the film from notorious schlock director Albert Zugsmith (Sex Kittens Go to College) is, to put it bluntly, nonsense. Should you choose to embrace that nonsense, you’ll be greeted with lots of falling bodies (including a bird), Asian women as slaves, […]
Vincent Price
Posted inArts & Culture
Elvira’s Haunted Hills
On her way to Paris to do her brand of burlesque, Elvira (Cassandra Peterson, who co-wrote) is stranded in the mountains of Romania, but finds welcome at the requisite spooky old castle. This isn’t so much a plot as a setup for joke after joke, all as flimsy as the elastic on Elvira’s signature costume. […]
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Black Zoo
But Michael’s “children” are in danger — or is that endangered? — when greedy, swingin’ businessman Jerry Stengel (Jerome Cowan, “The Maltese Falcon”) keen on visiting a particular “striptease parlor” wants to take the land on which the zoo sits so he can rezone it as a residential district. Michael refuses to sign the contract, so […]
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Master of the World
It’s now available at ClassicMoviesNow.com through MGM’s made-on-demand program, with no frills attached, but the important thing is that it’s out at all … assuming you’re a Price checker. If you liked his AIP vehicles adapting Edgar Allan Poe, you’ll probably feel the same about this AIP vehicle adapting Jules Verne — two novels, to […]
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Beyond a Reasonable Doubt / While the City Sleeps
Neither has enjoyed as lasting an impact as “Heat” — not to mention Lang’s other masterpieces, from “M” to “Metropolis,” or his string of pulpy Dr. Mabuse features — but are by no means worth ignoring. The two are now available as manufactured-on-demand DVDs from Warner Archive, in remastered editions. As the “Reasonable” hero, Dana Andrews […]
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Diary of a Madman
Tame then and tame now, they nonetheless primed me for the cathartic thrills of the genre. Up until its recent DVD debut, 1963’s “Diary Of A Madman” eluded me. Like the excellent series of Edgar Allan Poe films Price churned out under producer Roger Corman, this chiller, too, takes its inspiration from another classic author […]