MovieMorlocks.com – Richard Harland Smith

Richard Harland Smith

My grandmother Julia played piano in the Beckley, West Virginia silent movie house where my father Dick grew up watching the exploits of cowboy heroes Tom Mix, Buck Jones and The Three Mesquiteers. Raised in New England, I was a frequent attendee of the Danielson Cinema, built in 1900 as a playhouse and formerly called the Orpheum Theater. Due to my Dad's status as principal of our mill town's only high school, I was given a literal free pass to the movies and saw each new hit multiple times during its week-long run. Emancipated in my thinking and catholic in my tastes even by the age of 8, I would march the half mile to the Danielson Cinema to see such varied fare as DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, AIRPORT, THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER, RYAN'S DAUGHTER and THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, initiating a cinematic education whose first term ended when the Danielson Cinema was destroyed by fire in 1978.

After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre in New Haven, I moved to New York City to be an actor but switched gears to become an Off-Off Broadway playwright. My one act plays and full lengths have been performed at such varied Manhattan venues as The Grove Street Theatre, 29th Street Rep, Synchronicity Space, The Theatre-Studio, the Pulse Theatre, the Sanford Meisner Theatre, Raw Space and H.E.R.E. Performing Arts Center. In 2004, my wife and I relocated to Hollywood, where I currently write box copy, liner notes, talent bios and promotional material for several DVD companies and review DVDs for the Turner Classic Movies website. I am the author of several horror screenplays, am the former Euro-Cult film discussion moderator of the Mobius Home Video Forum and I have been a staff writer for Video Watchdog magazine since 1999. I'm a contributor to The Wallflower Press critical guides Contemporary North American Directors and Contemporary British and Irish Directors and to the upcoming Vampiros and Monstruos: The Mexican Horror Film of the 20th Century and The Book of Lists: Horror.

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Posts by Richard Harland Smith

Weasels Ripped My Flesh! reviewed!

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on March 8, 2013

Don’t get me wrong — cinemania will always be my favorite mania… but I do understand and appreciate other kinds of madness and passion. The compulsion to collect vinyl, for example (records, I mean, not pants) or for following the Grateful Dead, or for owning first editions, or for reading and even owning original copies […]

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So, you want me to watch a new movie, eh?

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on March 1, 2013

I saw a headline the other day that read “2013 Oscar Contenders!” Not even three months into the year and already that madness is starting. I failed to see any of this year’s Academy Award nominees or winners, so I didn’t have a dog in that fight. Truth be told, I don’t go in much […]

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People you should know: Ross Elliott

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on February 22, 2013

I was watching GUN CRAZY (1950) the other night for the whateverth time and at about 66 minutes in I heard a familiar voice. I was looking at the woman in the ticket booth, in the way I love to focus on extraneous characters (somewhat in line with what Morlock Greg wrote about on Wednesday) […]

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Reimagining Escape from the Planet of the Apes as a Warner Brothers gangster picture

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on February 15, 2013

If you grew up, as I did, in the Seventies and came of age with 20th Century Fox’s PLANET OF THE APES films then it is likely that you have struggled over the past forty years to make a case for the third film in the series, ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES (1971). […]

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E’reway in-hay the oney-may… or The Exorcist as a sequel to Gold Diggers of 1933

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on February 8, 2013

I’ve been on a pre-Code jag lately. Mind you, I’ve watched movies all my life that were made before the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code (which was drafted after the advent of sound but not really enforced until 1934) yet this is the first time I’ve ever gone back with a specific mind to […]

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Random observations: Pre-Code edition

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on February 1, 2013

It doesn’t have to be a manifesto every Friday (he says to himself, justifying the feeling of not wanting to spend a lot of time here today). Sometimes it just comes down to a whole bunch of ideas and opinions, some of them hare-brained, some of them half thought-out, and all of them mine. Dig…

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Riding shotgun with Bobby, or the Thompson Guide to Targets

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on January 25, 2013

I pulled my copy of Peter Bogdanovich’s TARGETS (1968) the other day as part of a job I was finishing on an upcoming Boris Karloff box set. I’ve seen the movie countless times since I first clapped eyes on it in the mid-80s, having first heard about it a decade earlier in the pages of […]

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Thompson! Can you hear me?

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on January 18, 2013

To my way of thinking there is no more cinematic an automatic weapon than the Thompson submachine gun. More than half of the association, for me, is the construction — that cylindrical magazine looks like a film canister and the distinctive rat-a-tat-tat of the of the Tommy gun’s report like the rattle of film threading […]

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Putting the I’m back in crime

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on January 11, 2013

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how work had reminded me of how much I had loved westerns as a boy and how much fun, how invigorating and nourishing it was, to return to that genre with a vengeance at the distance of many years. Well, it’s happened again, although we’re not talking […]

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Them bones! Them bones! The Living Skeleton on DVD!

Posted by Richard Harland Smith on January 4, 2013

When the Criterion Collection, via their Eclipse subsidiary, announced the release of a four-film DVD set from Japan’s Shochiku Studios, most of my fiends and fellows crowed about the imminent availability of Hajime Sato’s GOKE: BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL (KYUKTSUKI GOKEMIDORO, 1968)… while I rubbed my hands together in breathless anticipation of finally seeing Hiroshi […]

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