Shameless Self Expression

In 17 th Century Russia, a princess (Barbara Steele) is accused and convicted of vampirism and witchcraft. She is subsequently befitted with a spiked iron mask and burned at the stake. Cut to the 19 th Century professor Andrea Checchi and doctor John Richardson happen upon the chapel where the coffin holding the deceased princess is located. They accidentally revive her whilst one of them is tussling with a bat. Now the revived witch sets her sights on her descendant, Katya (also Steele).   One of the most important and influential Italian horror films ever made, this 1960 witchcraft story is also the best-remembered film in the career of Mario Bava ( “Danger Diabolik” , “Seven Dolls for an August Moon” ). Personally, I slightly prefer his “Kill, Baby…Kill” and “Black Sabbath” , but this film is nonetheless an undeniable classic. Bava was his own cinematographer, and he’s created a foggy, Gothic B&W work of art here. It’s probably Tim Burton’s idea of a wet dream, and wh...

During WWI, a German U-boat commanded by Capt. Von Schoenvorts (John McEnery, apparently dubbed by Anton Diffring) sinks a cargo boat. That boat’s passengers (Doug McClure and Susan Penhaligon among them) wrangle their way aboard the sub when it rises to the surface. After some scuffling, the two parties agree to a tenuous truce until they can find suitable neutral land to port. Instead, they losing their way and end up on an island called Caprona, which houses dinosaurs,   neanderthals, and a volcano. Anthony Ainley plays German Lt. Dietz, who is our obligatory disruptive mutineer.   Average adventure film from Amicus Films may as well have been titled “The Sub That Wasted Time and Forgot to Go Somewhere” . Directed by Kevin Connor ( “From Beyond the Grave” , “Motel Hell” , the much better “The People That Time Forgot” ), it’s at least 30 minutes before we get out of the submarine an onto land. Which means it’s 30 minutes worth of a submarine movie, and that’s not what I ...

In the early 1800s, Sidney Blackmer’s dastardly Count Fernand de Mondego lusts after Mercedes (Elissa Lanndi), the fiancé of Edmond Dantes (Robert Donat), the first officer of a French merchant ship. The captain of the ship (Lawrence Grant) is handed a letter from the exiled Napoleon, and at the moment of his death he hands this letter to Dantes. City magistrate Raymond de Villefort (Louis Calhern) realises that his father – the aforementioned ship’s captain – has aided the exiled Napoleon, and conspires to frame Dantes for the crime instead. He does this with the cooperation of the scheming Count and a third man named Danglars (Raymond Walburn), the ship’s ambitious second officer. Dantes is jailed, and an unawares Mercedes ends up married to the Count, having been told that Dantes died in prison. O.P. Heggie plays Dantes’ only company in his island prison stay. There Dantes stews and seethes for years, planning his revenge.   A top-drawer cast delivers in this classic 1934 sc...

Possibly suicidal, PTSD-suffering war veteran Joaquin Phoenix lives with his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) and earns a living bashing creeps with a ball-peen hammer. His latest gig has him hired by a senator to rescue his daughter from the usual sex trafficking creeps.   I didn’t like writer-director Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” at all, mostly because it never really got around to talking about Kevin enough . I’d take that terrible film over this one any day of the week, even though this one is actually the better made film in my view. Yeah, this is gonna be a difficult review. This 2018 film features a committed performance by the very talented Joaquin Phoenix, but is completely off-putting and by the final act it’s just a confusing mess. I found it the complete opposite of something I wanted to be subjecting myself to, much as I willingly slogged it out. And yet I feel like it would be unfair of me to properly grade the film at all, because I feel like it’s...

Newlyweds Stephanie Beacham and Ian Ogilvy move into the latter’s ancestral family home and almost instantaneously Beacham is freaked the hell out. She’s seeing things that no one else is, and they’re really scary things. With Ogilvy worried about his wife’s sanity, psychologist Peter Cushing is called upon to investigate the matter. Guy Rolfe turns up as the family solicitor, and Geoffrey Whitehead plays a woodsman named Silas whose ghost is seems to be haunting poor Beacham.   This 1973 Amicus film from director Roy Ward Baker ( “A Night to Remember” , “Quatermass and the Pit” , “The Vampire Lovers” , “Asylum” ) was one of the studio’s non-portmanteau films, and thus isn’t as well known as say “Asylum” or “Tales From the Crypt” . That’s a shame because I really like this one. It’s actually a really tragic, sad, and bleak story but it’s also my kind of horror movie: Atmospheric. It might even rank as the best horror film Amicus ever made (their best films overall however be...

Soldiers at a quarry dealing with the handling of radioactive materials are badly burned when a huge crack opens in the ground under them. Dean Jagger is a scientist at a nearby research facility who looks into the incident. Before long a series of attacks leave the victims badly burned if not completely melted. What on Earth – or anywhere else perhaps – is going on here? Anthony Newley and Michael Ripper play soldiers, Leo McKern is an investigator, John Harvey plays a military Major, and William Lucas plays Jagger’s right-hand man.   Directed by Leslie Norman (1958’s “Dunkirk” ), this 1956 Hammer sci-fi film was intended to be a spin-off from Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass series. However, since the screenplay was written by Jimmy Sangster ( “Horror of Dracula” , “The Snorkel” , “The Nanny” ) and not Kneale, the latter refused the use of his characters, thus the final product comes with some character alterations. It’s Quatermass in all but name, and frankly a lot better than Hamm...

Technically a ‘pom’ by birth, but we claim him as Australia’s own, John Farnham is for me the best vocalist we’ve ever had here. In addition, he was the sound of my childhood, especially his “Whispering Jack” and “Age of Reason” albums. He’s the perfect showman in concert and seemingly a great bloke too, with a fun sense of humour. He’s had a tough time of it health wise in recent years, known as ‘The Voice’ his voice has been dimmed through throat cancer surgery. Even in this documentary he sounds really raspy and unwell, I imagine even the more recent audio interview bits with him were still recorded some time before the 2022 surgery date. Directed by Poppy Stockell, I suspect this was a mater of getting this made as soon as humanly possibly before it potentially became too late to hear from the man first-hand (though I hear he has been at least able to sing a bit at home fairly recently). This 2023 documentary is essential viewing for all Australians as far as I’m concerned, but int...

Long-time married couple Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis (who was Oscar-nominated here) announce that they are splitting, which shocks their friends Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Then Woody and Mia start having marital woes of their own, with Woody’s wandering eye fixing on one of his young students (Juliette Lewis) and Mia being pursued by charming Liam Neeson. Lysette Anthony turns up as the object of Pollack’s desire.   I’ve enjoyed rather few Woody Allen films ( “Annie Hall” , “Deconstructing Harry” , “Alice” , “Broadway Danny Rose” , and “Blue Jasmine” among the good ones), and this 1992 talkfest is certainly not one of them. I say this with the full knowledge that I love the 120 minute screaming match “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” , but I don’t understand how anyone could be interested in watching this constant chatter and ugliness. The conversations are endless, there’s no room to follow along with them because no one seems to stop to take a breath.   Sydney Po...

After a nuclear apocalypse has devastated much of Earth and rendered it radioactive, there is a valley that has been protected by lead-bearing mountains. Among the protected is survivalist and former Navy commander Paul Birch, who lives with his daughter Lori Nelson and their stockpiled supplies. A few other characters turn up at Birch’s doorstep seeking refuge. They include a hoodlum (Mike Connors) and his stripper gal (Adele Jurgens), a uranium mining specialist (Richard Denning), and an elderly prospector (Raymond Hatton). Birch very reluctantly lets them in and that’s when the trouble starts as one of the survivors (Jonathan Haze) has been contaminated and is turning into something monstrous and menacing.   One of the earlier sci-fi directorial efforts from late director Roger Corman ( “A Bucket of Blood” , “It Conquered the World” , “The Intruder” , “Tomb of Ligeia” ), this 1955 low-budgeter is one of several Corman-directed films that frankly deserves to be talked about m...

Rebooting the franchise whilst also being a follow-up to the original “Gojira” , our title monster bursts out of an erupting volcano 30 years after the events of the first film. A group of fishermen witness this, but are quickly attacked by mutated sea lice, who kill all but one of the men. This lone survivor is rescued by a vacationing journo (Ken Tanaka) who tries to get all who will listen to take the story seriously. Familiar faces Yoshifumi Tajima and Hiroshi Koizumi (who had roles in several previous Toho films) turn up as a government minister and geologist, respectively.   The 1984 Japanese version of what was eventually sliced and diced into the Americanised “Godzilla 1985” , this Koji Hashimoto (a veteran 2 nd assistant director on several Toho films including the tedious “King Kong vs. Godzilla” ) film was meant to be the vastly superior cut I was informed. I haven’t seen “Godzilla 1985” in decades, but this sloppy, unfocussed, and dull affair is bottom tier Godzil...

Paul Rudd stars as real-life 1930s baseball player Moe Berg, a Jewish-American who also doubled as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services. They’ve tasked him with finding out if theoretical scientist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) is secretly working on an atomic bomb project for the Nazis. Guy Pearce plays chief of foreign intelligence Robert Furman, Jeff Daniels is the OSS chief, Paul Giamatti plays a Dutch-American physicist, Hiroyuki Sanada plays a gay Japanese delegate associate of Moe’s, and Sienna Miller is Moe’s girlfriend.   Although I have my issues with it, I seem to like this 2018 film from Aussie director Ben Lewin ( “The Sessions” ) a bit more than most people, enough for at least a soft recommendation. Scripted by Robert Rodat ( “Saving Private Ryan” ), this true story is a bit disjointed at first, and also seems to end strangely early, but if you like your true stories and non-Bond spy stories this one’s worth a look.   There isn’t a bad performanc...

Innocent Maria Rohm and heroin-addicted Luciana Paluzzi are two of the newbies at a remote island women’s prison run by a brutal and sadistic lesbian warden (Mercedes McCambridge) and overseen by a sleazy governor (Herbert Lom). Maria Schell plays a well-meaning but useless prison shrink, who tries to get better treatment for the prisoners, but eventually Rohm and Paluzzi realise their only chance for survival is escape. Rosalba Neri plays the requisite 'warden’s pet' who has her eyes on one of the newbies in particular.   1969 Jesus Franco ( “Vampyros Lesbos” , “Eugenie de Sade” , “Count Dracula” ) film is one of the earlier versions of the kind of sleazy, exploitative women in prison (WIP for short) films that would become a bit of a schlock staple in the 70s and 80s. It’s probably one of the best as well, at least from the ones I’ve seen. It’s a solid effort from the erratic but prolific Franco who made several films in this subgenre.   If this is your kind of film,...

Stefanie Powers is an American in Britain currently engaged to Maurice Kaufmann. Whilst in the country, she decides to visit the mother (Tallulah Bankhead) of her previous fiancé who died a few years back. What Powers had hoped would be a quick pop-in to pay her respects, turns into a seemingly unending bizarre nightmare as the old bible-thumping battle-axe ensures Powers can’t leave. Peter Vaughan and Yootha Joyce play Bankhead’s creepy servants who have their own alternate reasons for staying in Bankhead’s employ. Donald Sutherland turns up in the role of an intellectually challenged handyman.   Although it’s not among the better-known or more widely seen Hammer films, this 1965 outing from director Silvio Narizzano ( “Georgy Girl” , “Loot” ) has its fans out there. I’m not among them. Also known as “Fanatic” and scripted by the pretty reliable Richard Matheson ( “The Incredible Shrinking Man” , “The Fall of the House of Usher” ), this adaptation of an Anne Blaisdell novel r...