Opening with a heavy hand — perhaps the least subtle opening theme in history is interrupted by explosion — the film explores what would happen if a virus resulted in death and destruction of crops, paving the way for famine — and, thus, wonders newscasters, perhaps cannibalism. Upon hearing rumors that big cities may be nerve-gassed, […]
Warner Archive
Posted inArts & Culture
No Blade of Grass
Opening with a heavy hand — perhaps the least subtle opening theme in history is interrupted by explosion — the film explores what would happen if a virus resulted in death and destruction of crops, paving the way for famine — and, thus, wonders newscasters, perhaps cannibalism. Upon hearing rumors that big cities may be nerve-gassed, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
No Blade of Grass
Opening with a heavy hand — perhaps the least subtle opening theme in history is interrupted by explosion — the film explores what would happen if a virus resulted in death and destruction of crops, paving the way for famine — and, thus, wonders newscasters, perhaps cannibalism. Upon hearing rumors that big cities may be nerve-gassed, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Carey Treatment
It’s almost as if 1972’s “The Carey Treatment” was based on the 1968 novel “A Case of Need,” written by Jeffrey Hudson, the blockbuster author’s med-school nom de plume. While not the first Crichton adaptation to hit the screen — that’d be the prior year’s “The Andromeda Strain” — “The Carey Treatment” is among the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Carey Treatment
It’s almost as if 1972’s “The Carey Treatment” was based on the 1968 novel “A Case of Need,” written by Jeffrey Hudson, the blockbuster author’s med-school nom de plume. While not the first Crichton adaptation to hit the screen — that’d be the prior year’s “The Andromeda Strain” — “The Carey Treatment” is among the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Carey Treatment
It’s almost as if 1972’s “The Carey Treatment” was based on the 1968 novel “A Case of Need,” written by Jeffrey Hudson, the blockbuster author’s med-school nom de plume. While not the first Crichton adaptation to hit the screen — that’d be the prior year’s “The Andromeda Strain” — “The Carey Treatment” is among the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
7 Faces of Dr. Lao
Although Randall primarily stars as the Chinese circus owner Dr. Lao, he also appears as Medusa, The Abominable Snowman, a horned goat man, a blind fortune teller and — in one, don’t-blink scene — a stupefied circusgoer. Lao rolls into a Western town on the verge of collapse, thanks to a drought. His mysterious and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Traveling Executioner
With an old-timey setting that belies its subject matter, this odd-as-oddball black comedy casts Keach in the title role, traversing early 20th-century America in his Dutch-boy haircut and portable electric chair, going wherever the death-penalty gigs take him. Rather than be menacing, he sends his clients off to death with — well, yes, a fatal […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Phantom of Hollywood
Witness Brian De Palma’s cult classic “Phantom of the Paradise,” the ’80s straight-to-VHS slasher “Phantom of the Mall” and the somewhat obscure “The Phantom of Hollywood,” a 1974 CBS movie of the week now brought back to public consciousness via Warner Archive. Without me telling you, you can guess its basic story points: The fictional […]
Posted inArts & Culture
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 […]