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NYFF: The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
For director Michael Powell, The Red Shoes was “mostly a sketch for The Tales of Hoffmann“. So far the sketch has eclipsed the full painting, with The Red Shoes a repertory film staple that plays...
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And Now Let’s All Agree to Never Discuss This Movie Again
Janet Leigh is TCM’s Star of the Month and that is, to say the least, kind of fitting. After all, Janet Leigh is the most famous cinematic slasher victim of all time in one of the most famous and...
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Freak Shows: Come one, come all to the Scariest Show On Earth!
Lon Chaney in HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924) Last night FX premiered the new season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY. The award-winning horror anthology’s latest incarnation is called FREAK SHOW and it’s set in...
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Friday Fearback: 31 Screams
A number of years ago, for reasons that seem a bit hazy to me now, I began a pseudonymous film blog called Arbogast on Film. (I’m often asked why I chose the name Arbogast, an obvious allusion to...
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How Not to Stay Awake, French Style
Once upon a time I was very tired. More to the point, I was very tired in Montreal. Julie and I were in Montreal for a child-free vacation, and we were so happy to have some time to ourselves we hadn’t...
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Lift Up Your Voice In Song… Or Don’t
Today TCM airs Bob Fosse’s 1969 musical, Sweet Charity, starring Shirley MacLaine and Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s a loose – very loose – musical adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 1957 masterpiece, Nights of...
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Hollywood’s Deco-rators: Cedric, Hans, and Van Nest
Our Modern Maidens (left, 1929), best known as an early flapper vehicle for Joan Crawford, airs on TCM this Wednesday at 9:45am. In addition to its role in Crawford’s burgeoning stardom, the film was...
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Lonely Rodeo: The Lusty Men (1952)
The Lusty Men is haunted by the Great Depression. It’s about economic displacement, wandering the countryside to make a buck at podunk rodeos, and where the dream of owning a home seems forever out...
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The Proving Grounds of Safari! (1956)
I recently wrote up Safari for TCM (it can be found here on the main site) and it airs later tonight, much later, so here’s my chance to elaborate on a few things I put in the article but couldn’t...
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Aaahoo! She-Wolf of London (1946)
The setting is London in the early 1900s, where a young Scottish woman named Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) is preparing to wed her beau (Don Porter). The happy couple’s plans are interrupted when...
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Hand in Hand in Hell: My Top 10 Horror Movie Brother and Sister Acts
This Sunday, October 19th, marks the 30th anniversary of the death of my sister Cheryl Ann, or Cheri, as we called her. She died just two weeks shy of her 29th birthday. I was 23 at the time, just...
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I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords
So, in case you haven’t heard, there’s this movie called Phase IV. It’s a 1970s apocalyptic sci-fi thriller about killer super-intelligent ants, and it was directed by Saul Bass of all people. And...
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Stephen King Goes to the Movies
A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King (Laurent Bouzereau, 2011), an hour-long documentary with the iconic best-selling author, premiered three years ago on TCM and is being brought back...
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Happy Birthday Fayard Nicholas
A few years back, I was teaching the musical comedy when a male student remarked that he did not care for musicals because they were like chick flicks—too focused on romance and too filled with music...
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Bowling for Dollars: Kingpin (1996)
Farrelly Brothers movies are akin to family gatherings. They are filled with extreme neuroses, unexpected violence, and deep undercurrents of affection. Their films are even populated with friends...
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The Fog of Horror
Later tonight, as in tomorrow morning on the east coast, TCM airs The Fog, the 1980 John Carpenter movie that, like a lot of John Carpenter movies, opened to middling reviews only to be heartily...
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Mummy Dearest
Hammer Films produced four Mummy movies between 1959 and 1971 and this coming Saturday (Oct. 25th) TCM is airing one of my favorites, Seth Holt’s BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1971). This unabashedly...
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Brains! (Think about it.)
Wrap your head around this: the word “brain” appears in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus just once. Chapter 4, to be precise, in a throwaway line about everything that...
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Halloween Won’t Hurt You: Or, How My Daughter Learned to Stop Worrying and...
It’s not that I advocate terrifying children, I hope you understand, but… well, let me start at the beginning. When I was 8 years old, my dad used to wake me up late at night to join him in watching...
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The Perfect Circle
Today, Planet of the Apes airs on TCM and it’s a movie that I saw, honestly, dozens of times in the seventies and eighties. I watched it and its sequels over and over again, even giving the lousy...
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