Shameless Self Expression

A monk (Ulderico Sciaretta) goes to a nightclub to see an acquaintance who works there and proceeds to tell her a story from long ago. In his youth, the monk and his five boozy friends end up in a dingy old castle where a haunted old man (Christopher Lee) offers them treasure if only they can find his lost love.   One of the more obscure – and forgettable – films in the career of Christopher Lee, this 1963 film from one-and-done writer-director Giuseppe Veggezzi is for Lee completists only, like me. And frankly, even I didn’t get much out of this one. It’s been dreadfully edited – apparently the film went through more than one production company and much of the film was changed before its eventual release. The seams show. Badly. Characters are introduced early that have no bearing on anything else. The film’s opener sets up Ulderico Sciaretta’s monk character as our protagonist only for him to be a bit of an also-ran for the bulk of the film, not to mention seeming like a compl...

Edward G. Robinson is a college professor of middle age, specialising in matters of the criminal mind. While his wife and kids (one played by a young Robert Blake) are away, Robinson meets and is infatuated with a model (Joan Bennett), who was the subject for a painting/mural outside a gentleman’s club he frequents. She’s in some trouble, and she’s about to drop the poor naïve fool in it, too. All because he couldn’t keep from having a wandering eye while the wife’s away. Tsk, tsk. Raymond Massey plays Robinson’s slightly condescending District Attorney friend, whilst Dan Duryea turns up late as a sinister blackmailer.   There’s few things I hate more in movies than when a film fails to stick the landing. This 1944 mystery from director Fritz Lang ( “Metropolis” , “Man Hunt” , “Rancho Notorious” , “The Big Heat” ) and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson ( “The Grapes of Wrath” , “My Cousin Rachel” , “The Dirty Dozen” ) is one such frustrating near-miss. Damn it, this thing was on its...

Keegan Allen plays a minor YouTube celeb who vlogs his supposedly wacky adventures with his friends (Siya and George Janko) and girlfriend Holland Roden. This time they’re travelling to Russia to explore an escape room that is apparently not nearly as lame as it sounds. They first go to a Russian nightclub with their Russian pal named Alexei, and get into a scuffle with some goons. Anyway, once in the escape room it proves to be very difficult and predictably deadly as our protagonists puzzle for their lives. Denzel Whitaker plays a buddy Allen hasn’t seen in a long time who tags along for the trip, Pasha Lychnikoff plays a sinister Russian bad guy.   Writer-director Will Wernick gives us another escape room film with this 2020 tedium. However, while Wernick is the man behind a film called “Escape Room” , he didn’t make the precise “Escape Room” film you’re probably thinking of. His one (which I’ve not seen) came out in 2017 and is in no way affiliated with the mediocre 2019 “...

At the request of brother Mycroft Holmes, an aging Sherlock Holmes (Sir Christopher Lee) and companion Dr. Watson (Patrick Macnee) venture to Vienna circa 1910 to investigate and hopefully retrieve a new explosive Doomsday Device before it gets into the wrong hands. While there, Holmes gets reacquainted with one of the great loves of his life, sassy American Opera singer Irene Adler (Morgan Fairchild). Engelbert Humperdinck turns up briefly as a pompous and smug-looking performer, John Bennett plays Sigmund Freud (but looks a lot more like actor Maximillian Schell).   Christopher Lee played numerous Arthur Conan Doyle characters in his long career and played Sherlock Holmes himself at least three times on screen. One of those three times was in this 1991 three-hour TV movie event from former Hammer director Peter Sasdy ( “Taste the Blood of Dracula” , “Countess Dracula” , “Hands of the Ripper” , “Nothing But the Night” ). There’s nothing superlative about this one, it’s got a r...