Christina Rice is a Los Angeles-based librarian, film historian and new mother who is currently writing a biography of Hollywood actress Ann Dvorak (1911-1979) while maintaining the website Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel. This busy lady was kind enough to spend a little time with me on what would have been Dvorak’s 100th birthday in [...]

Few horror movies scream summer quite like FROGS (1972). Released in the spring of 1972, the film was poised midway between Alfred Hitchcock’s proto-revenge-of-nature thriller THE BIRDS (1963) and JAWS (1975) but took its direct inspiration from WILLARD (1971), in which rats wrecked havoc at the behest of a societal malcontent. WILLARD beget its own [...]

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 [...]

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), [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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: [...]