terror in the midnight sun

I added this listing on the blog roll at the side of our page, but never had the chance to let our patrons truly know about Lars Erik Holmquist's recent contribution to the world of twisted cinema blogging. Lars and I met via the early days of the internet when he managed the Hong Kong Cinema Homepage around 1994, the first on-line resource for fans of Asian action. We got the chance to meet here in Toronto when he visited from Sweden and Lars was even able to attend one of my Kung Fu Fridays film screenings (The Bride With White Hair I believe). Even though an ocean separates us, I felt that I had found my Swedish counterpart when we swapped stories of organizing screenings of HK goodness and poster collecting. Right now as I post this, Lars is on his way back from Tokyo and I am looking forward to seeing on his blog what stuff he collected while there.

Meanwhile, read about his collection of posters, particularly this fascinating look at restoration and linen backing.

PS - Rumor has it that he even knows a certain Swedish actress known for her role as a one-eyed avenger...

fill your eyes with the screen

Been meaning to give props to Steven Hill for his movie title website where he posts shots of the titlecards of various flicks. Here is just a small smapling of the fun stuff you can find there:

More playing around

What can this 'love games' business all mean? We need to get serious.

personally I love Monopoly. I wonder what Cindy loves...

The Evil That Men Do

Haven't seen this one but I've heard it's pretty rough...

Mandom!

And speaking of Bronson...

Let It Go To The Machine

The poster for Telefon was another one of my favourites from the seventies.

Montreal - Italian Style!

Kick-ass car chase from the 1976 Italo-actioner Blazing Magnum, starring Stuart Whitman, Martin Landau and Carole Laure! Spot the Montreal streets and neighbourhoods getting pummeled by muscle cars in this grimy but punchy sequence...now if only I could find the karate-chopping transvestite gang rooftop fight scene this picture also contains! I feel so patriotic right now.

(thanks for the find, Reitzel!)

Norman Mailer's Greatest Hits

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

bad guys in tards

Had a DV cam in my studio this week and was looking through stuff I filled the ends of VHS tapes I with and transfered this. You can read more about the Italian fumetti comic book hero KRIMINAL aka SATANIK here and here, at Jay Stephens' blog. I'd like to say that this will be my 2008 Halloween costume, but worried about a pot belly. Got to hit the super criminal diet!

Don't Die For Me, Argentina

Looks like Radley Metzger had a hate-on for Eva Perón. Sure, he transplanted the story to Europe for the movie but this is obviously modeled on the life and rule of the First Lady of Argentina. Behold the sleazy, too-brief trailer for Little Mother (aka Blood Queen), based on the anti-Peronist biography 'The Woman With A Whip', starring Christiane Kruger, daughter of Hardy.

I wish I'd written that...

Here's a nice and quick, snack-sized bite into the fascinatingly tasty history of those types of movies that one talks about in hushed tones or sometimes never at all and especially not in the presence of those possessing a delicate disposition. No sir. You know the type I'm getting at because you've been around a bit, right? The ribald kind. Are you blushing?

George Segal: Secretly Canadian

We need to get our hands on a Canadian thriller called Russian Roulette (1975) - directed by veteran editor Lou Lombardo who, judging from his work on The Wild Bunch, must know his way around an action scene. Set in Vancouver, this one stars the underrated George Segal as a burned-out undercover Mountie (sic) who stumbles across a plot to assassinate the visiting Soviet Premier.

When I was a kid I was a bit obsessed with two 1977 George Segal movies - his Sensurround™ enhanced, quasi-disaster film Rollercoaster (a worn-out cop playing cat-and-mouse with an amusement park bomber played by future George W. Bush look-alike Timothy Bottoms) and Fun With Dick And Jane, the broad satire of the middle-class seventies American dream (written by Mordecai Richler) with Jane Fonda and Ed McMahon (sic). Segal was as much of a ubiquitous male lead in seventies American cinema as Donald Sutherland or Elliott Gould (Segal was even in Altman's California Split), but his skill with both comedy and drama may have led to his eventual marginalization as a leading man as the seventies wound down; that and some bad career decisions (turning down the lead in Blake Edwards' 10, for example) led to a future plucking the banjo on Johnny Carson's couch while promoting TV movies like The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood co-starring Morgan Fairchild (sic). Yes, it had come to this.

Roulette is an British-Canadian co-production apparently loaded with quirks and stuffed with weird casting, including Denholm Elliott as a 'greasy informant' as one review has it, and Louise Fletcher, just off her Oscar-winning role in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, in a bit part as a telephone operator. Plus a rooftop climax involving high-powered sniper rifles, helicopters and a seventies Vancouver skyline - damn, this thing has got to pay off!

This might wet your whistle for international intrigue involving George Segal - the stylish trailer for the trippy 1966 cold war thriller The Quiller Memorandum - directed by Michael (Logan's Run) Anderson!

life changing last minute decision

Jesse and I put the "Gone Fishing" sign up in the ticket booth and ran off to see Nic Ray's PARTY GIRL. Wowza! Show girls and gangsters!

NEW SCOPE PRINT! A smashing Scope print of a true cult film, beloved by nouvelle vague directors and French critics who saw it as the supreme statement of Nicholas Ray's belief in the redemptive power of love. (Fereydoun Hoveyda's essay on PARTY GIRL is a classic of Fifties Cahiers du cinéma rapture: “A brilliant film . . . There are torrents of inventiveness. Every sequence is a cascade of ideas. . . . It should be clear that I think PARTY GIRL is Ray's most interesting film to date.”) Set in Chicago during Prohibition, PARTY GIRL employs a gaudy mise en scène keyed to the colour red to capture the violence of the time and the torment of the relationship between syndicate lawyer Robert Taylor and showgirl Cyd Charisse, an Oklahoma chorine who wants to be a big city model but ends up a gangland moll. (Charisse's celebrated gams provide crazy tension with the horizontals of the Scope image, and contrast symbolically with Taylor's hobbled leg.) Contorted with contempt, Lee J. Cobb rages as mob boss Rico Angelo, shooting up a photo of Jean Harlow in his baroquely upholstered office, but his power ultimately proves impotent against the force of love. The film's atmosphere of bitter self-recognition (Charisse comments that both she and the lawyer are prostitutes), spangled spectacle, and acid-splashed violence is powerful, but Ray ensures the possibility of regeneration, most markedly in the Sirk-like healing of Taylor's affliction. “Ray's most beautiful film” (Joel Magny).

torn from today's headlines!

Taken from Variety:

Confession...

Colin, Michael, I'm afraid I must cop to eating the 20 bags of Nibs over the last few weeks...I've been hoarding them in the ticket booth.

I'm good for it, though. I won't be able to reimburse you for a little while because I have to pay for my upcoming dentist's appointment. (damn Nibs getting stuck in your teeth! Happy, Colin?) He's a German dentist, so I'm sure I'm in good hands (apparently he gives a 10% discount if you can answer a skill-testing question: "Is it safe?").

trailers from HELL! Edgar Wright on Suspiria

Been meaning to post to the blog for... from Joe Dante's TRAILERS FROM HELL project - Edgar "Shaun of the Dead" Wright on the European trailer for SUSPIRIA, highlighting the music of GOBLIN. Kudos to Mr. Wright for hissing at the hipsters who ruin the cinema experience by shouting out their own personal Mystery Science Theater musings. And double kudos to Mr. Wright for attending the world premiere of Dario Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS at the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness programme! Below check out the audience singing Happy Birthday to the maestro at that screening. And that is yours truly in the suit on stage. So grateful to Jesse and Michael who gave me the night off to wrangle Asia, but guys, we are still missing those 20 bags of Nibs from the snack bar that eve...

meanwhile on 42nd Street... hooky time!

I'd like to thank the Academy and to my father for taking me to see Barbarella and The Elephant Man in the cinema...

And the award for "Best Movie Website" goes to...

Happy Hallowe'en!

I don't even really care all that much about this day and you're lucky that I don't have a ton of scary posters. So, no more autumnal countdowns! Enjoy this one while you still can.

One of the best for last. The incredibly weird and superb Peeping Tom. Another movie that would haunt my subconscious until I saw a small picture of the lead character in a magazine and was instantly scared anew and had to see it again. I can't believe it played on TV. There should be a law to protect children like me. Anyway, it's a great and ghoulish horror and it also has some neat comments on film watching and whatnot in there. Score!





Here is the British one sheet. The UK uses the horizontal quad in their cinemas but they produce these for Brititsh films being played outside the country, apparently. This one is good and lurid. Sex.





And the US one sheet goes more for the jugular. Violence.

Countdown #6(66)

Pure wonderfulness. Who could resist? Steckler, you've done it again!








And once more with the colourful alias.

Countdown #5

Georges Franju's excellent 1960 horror, Les Yeux Sans Visage, made more American and eye-grabbingly lurid via re-titling and double-billed up with a Japanese/American piece, The Manster. I can't comment for the latter but the former is something I've enjoyed immensely in all formats. A perfect Hallowe'en treat.


You have to go and watch the trailer manually since the embed action is disabled.


Here it is...and it's worth clicking.







And here is the original and altogether outstandingly beautiful and rich French poster...le grand.

Countdown #4

This is one that became a favourite after reading the Incredibly Strange Films book from RE/Search which featured an essay on it. First, I had to track down a copy and then it was quickly cemented into favedom. I was sorta born to like this type of thing but this one is even more special than most, at least to me. The story and performances are so amazing that it is instantly fantastic although, again, a little light on actual 'horror' although it does feature Lon Chaney Jr near the end of his remarkable career. I cherish it and I'm looking forward to the newest DVD version which promises to be something just a little more than the previous one. Jack Hill should be sainted. He is here, I know.



This poster is so hard to find that it's almost crazy. Almost. I was lucky enough to fall into one and, at the time, it was the most I'd ever spent on a single movie poster but I am not regretting it one bit. I see this as probably the last thing I would ever sell from the archive. I've only seen one other sold and I missed out on the lobby set at auction. Too much $! But enough about me...how have you been?





Also, this odd little pairing with Spider Baby under one of it's alias titles, The Liver Eaters. This just seems like a very low-budget drive-in release but it has its own charms.

Countdown #3

I'm counting this countdown upwards.

Okay, if ever there was a film most aptly suited to the tastes of the patrons who gather in our vaunted 'cinema', this is it. Maybe a little loose on the horror angle but totally tight and absolutely giving it up spread-legged style in every other desirable department. Satanists, winnebago campers, dirtbikes, Oates(!), Fonda, Swit and all the crashed-up, smash-'em-up action that your seat can stand! Hallelujah! The snake scene alone is worth a million dollars in crisp bills.





Two styles of posters even! The hits keep on coming!

Countdown #2

A classic in so many ways. There's that fantastic turn (and monologue) by Piper Laurie that gets totally exciting everytime you see it. Spacek rules and the opening scene is as killer as the final! Amy Irving? PJ Soles? C'mon, you can almost smell the roadhouse whiskey!

what happened last Halloween in our little cinema...

now I am in the spirit. although I still think 70s nostalgic filthy thoughts looking at her...

Messiah1
Uploaded by throma

slowly from filthy to frightful

I'll get on this Halloween countdown bandwagon soon...

The Monster Of Camp Sunshine 1964 Trailer Horror Sexploitati
Uploaded by pogox

The Now Child... CAMILLE 2000

I so want this soundtrack!!!

CAMILLE 2000 -
Uploaded by VagrancyFilms

Countdown

I know that the WFMU blog (which is so rad) is doing a countdown to Hallowe'en but I don't really care because I thought of it too and this one will feature some favourites of mine (not theirs) and hopefully ours and a trailer and a poster and they should gradually put you in the mood for whatever it is you do on the 31st of October.

Let's go!

We'll start off with some lighter (not better or worse, mind you) fare.

cause I feel filthy in a Metzger manner...