… that guys in movies will never again wear top hats.

We all know the drill: a mad killer, a disparate collection of potential victims, the first murder, then the second, a third follows, usually a fourth… and before you can say Jack Robinson the Ripper you’ve got yourself a good old fashioned stiff stack, a cadaver crop. A body count. We tend to think of […]

If I remember correctly I first heard about THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL (1968) in Michael J. Weldon’s The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, where Mike tagged it as “a weird one.” (He said more, but spoilers abound.) There was a beguiling accompanying photograph of star Susan Strasberg adoring a severed doll’s head, which […]

I hope you’ll forgive my absence from the blog today but I’m off covering the 4th TCM Film Festival in Hollywood. You can follow my reporting at the official festival website and live blog, where my Morlock brother Pablo Kjolseth, friends Jeremy Arnold, Stephanie Thames, John Miller, Nathaniel Thompson, and our bosses will be covering […]

And I quote… (In) 1973, a horror-porn film called SEXCULA went before the cameras. Costing something in the neighborhood of $85,000, SEXCULA was credited to a director named “Bob Hollowich” (actually John Holbrook, later thecinematographer of GHOSTKEEPER) and a producer named “Clarence Frog” (real name, Clarence Newfield). Holbrook is co-credited under his real name for […]

The consensus among Hammer horror fans and genre know-it-alls seems to be that Michael Gough’s performance in DRACULA (US: HORROR OF DRACULA, 1958) is the film’s one black mark, a detriment to what otherwise might be considered a perfect motion picture. The disdain generated by Gough’s contribution is best summarized, I think, by Jonathan Rigby, […]

Noir City, the annual festival of film noir, returns to the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and the Aero Theater in Santa Monica starting this Friday and kicking off three weeks of fate, fear, frustration, folly and femme fatales. I now quote from the official press release: “Whether you’re on the beat […]

It’s been long enough since I last wrote with any regularity for Video Watchdog that I feel certain I may speak critically of it without attracting charges of cronyism. I first contributed to the magazine in 1997, with an article on the black-and-white and 3-strip Technicolor versions of Michael Curtiz’ DOCTOR X (1932), and I joined its Kennel […]

These are exciting times for nerdish types such as myself. Here in the States, the Universal classic monster canon has been remastered recently for Blu-ray, teasing out details in the art direction of these seminal horror films that have long been obscured by nth generation revival house prints and substandard video tape and DVD transfers. […]