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.
Posts by Richard Harland Smith

To be honest, I’m not really suggesting that Oscar-winning American actress Meryl Streep has any kind of grudge against César-winning French actress Isabelle Huppert, or vice versa. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about their respective careers lately and it seems to me that stating a preference for one over the other says a lot [...]

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Though I was an infrequent VHS tape buyer until the medium was nearly dead (at which point I went a little crazy buying out the stock of shuttered video stores) and I never got on the laser disc bandwagon (for which I was teased mercilessly by my fellows – I’m looking at you, Tim Lucas), [...]

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Hitting the shelves of your local department/electronics store this summer is the Roger Corman-produced BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980). The DVD/Blu-ray release from Shout! Factory is timed to mark the 30th anniversary of the film’s premiere back in the day when there was only one STAR WARS (1977) sequel. I was  nearly 16 in the [...]

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Just in over the transom is the latest issue of Steve Puchalski’s essential, incomparable, irreverent, inflammatory, indomitable Shock Cinema, whose motto is “Serving the Film Fanatic since 1990.” Can that be right — 21 years? I caught up with the mag in the mid-90s, when it was (as I remember, correct me if I’m wrong) [...]

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The HorrorDads are getting the jump on the holiday weekend with something a little different today. Instead of our customary roundtable discussion, Jeff Allard, Dennis Cozzalio, Paul Gaita, Greg Ferrara, Nicholas McCarthy and I will take the stage one by one to discuss a particular horror movie father. This isn’t meant to be listing of [...]

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God and the Devil are pretty different, I hear, but there’s one thing they have in common – details. One of the things I love about old movies is the feeling I get from insert shots and second unit bric-a-brac that has little narrative currency but which adds tremendous texture and mood to the piece. [...]

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Short answer: no. But dig… in 1965, the hard-working Hollywood character actor (THE KILLERS, SORRY WRONG NUMBER, -30-), TV director-for hire (HAVE GUN – WILL TRAVEL, BAT MASTERSON, 77 SUNSET STRIP), producer (AN AMERICAN DREAM, THE COOL ONES, COUNTDOWN), radio voice of Marshal Matt Dillon before GUNSMOKE came to television, narrator of THE FUGITIVE (“Name: [...]

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Women in prison movies are the universal language – go to any corner of the world and some filmmaker has at one time or another stuck a bunch of actresses behind bars and made a movie about what goes in a world without men. In Spain you’ve got your 99 WOMEN (1969), in Italy your [...]

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I’m different, I guess. I never got into the “so bad it’s good” thing where people watch movies (or read books or listen to music) with the sole intention of making fun. It’s not as though I grew up in un-ironic times. We had Mad magazine and its great movie spoofs and Playboy magazine’s TV [...]

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I’m not going to go so far as to say my personality is comprised entirely of movie characters but, boy-oh-boy, I have more than my fair share kicking around under my skin. How could I not? I started walking to the movies alone at the age of 9 or 10… walking half a mile to [...]

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