Shameless Self Expression

Set in the late 1800s, surgeon Ronald Lewis is asked to venture to the castle of Baron Sardonicus (Guy Rolfe) by Lewis’ former lover (Audrey Dalton), now Mrs. Sardonicus. Sardonicus is afflicted with a certain condition which he believes Lewis can help him with. Once at the castle, Lewis witnesses servant Krull (Oscar Homolka) torturing someone, making Lewis wonder what on Earth he has gotten himself into. He then meets the facially-scarred Baron, who proceeds to tell Lewis the story about how he came to be afflicted with a ghoulish, permanently frozen smile. Erika Peters appears in flashbacks as Sardonicus’ first wife.   Director/producer William Castle ( “The House on Haunted Hill” , “The Tingler” ) and screenwriter/author Ray Russell ( “The Premature Burial” ) offer up a bit of a Price-Corman-Poe film with this enjoyable macabre 1961 film. Good-looking for the presumably low-budget, Castle is very well assisted here by B&W cinematographer Burnett Guffey ( “King Ray” , “B...

Captained by Kirk Douglas, an American aircraft carrier departing from Pearl Harbour gets caught in an unusual storm. Afterwards, they find they are unable to pick up any comms signals outside of outdated radio broadcasts and wartime coded messages. Further investigations reveal that ships that were destroyed during WWII are still out there in the ocean in the exact same location they were in the war. Yep, they’ve travelled back in time to 1941. What to do? And how in the hell will they get out of the 1940s and back to the present day? Martin Sheen plays a systems analyst on board the ship to observe its functionality. James Farentino and Ron O’Neal play Commanders, Charles Durning is a 1940s Senator, Katharine Ross plays the Senator’s aide, and Soon-Tek Oh plays a feisty downed Japanese pilot.   Perhaps if I hadn’t seen “The Philadelphia Experiment” (both versions) before this 1980 film from director Don Taylor ( “Five Man Army” , “Escape From the Planet of the Apes” ) I migh...

When an American photojournalist is captured and held hostage by a Bosnian war criminal (Eli Danker), the US response is to send in a six-man team of elite Special Forces bad arses, led by Major Harding (Marshall R. Teague) and including Tim Abell as his second-in-command. Scott Adkins turns up as a British SAS man on a separate but connected vengeance mission.   An early teaming of director Isaac Florentine and actor/martial artist Scott Adkins (later to pair up for the excellent “Undisputed II: Last Man Standing” and several other films), this 2003 special ops action film gives the B-grade action movie audience what it wants. Florentine knows what he’s doing and is damn good at it. This is for a niche audience, but it will satisfy that audience, an audience I’m a part of. Here Florentine is basically making a Chuck Norris movie (Nu Image/Millennium Films basically being the modern Cannon/Golan-Globus), except with more emphasis on teamwork than you’d ever find Chuck involved...