Killer house horror comedy from Japan that's amassed quite a cult following.
Kathleen Quinlan, in a blessedly unsentimental and unsymbolic characterization, is a pretty tough nut, possessed by a secret society of demons and sworn to serve as their protectress; and Bibi Andersson, who owns a pair of pale -green eyes that are a perfect match to Quinlan's, is the heroic nutcracker, …
Like a 1930s MGM literary adaptation, this movie begins with an unattached hand opening a tattered copy of D'Annunzio's L'Innocente on a background of crushed velvet, and leafing through it at the rate of a phenomenal speed-reader, or else at the rate of the typical modern reader's impatience with D'Annunzio. …
Another of Michael Cacoyannis's essays on the topic, "Is Greek Tragedy Dead?" He argues no, and he persuades you yes. This treatment of the Euripides play, driven drudgily to its foreordained conclusion by an unrelenting timpanist who must have been paid under the table by the aspirin industry, is, if …
Made-in-Spain shocker with a sorely underdeveloped and underexplained idea about the children on a remote, hot, all-white island waking up in unison one night and banding together gigglingly in a game of adulticide. With Lewis Fiander, Prunella Ransome; directed by Narcisco Ibanez Serrador.
Hemingway's discursive unfinished novel wasn't yet pulled together when the author died; but the moviemakers, undaunted, plow through two barely connected storylines, one a family drama and the other a To Have and Have Not smuggling escapade, as though they imagine they are dealing with great, fundamental wisdoms ("I know …
An almost unexportable English comedy, one which takes its pleasure in the common schoolboy practice of fantasizing about the pigpen conditions of life in the oldendays. Even for viewers who've received a proper English education in Arthurian legends, it is probably not awfully intelligible. In the slough of messy atmospherics …
Tony Richardson's pastel-colored retreat to the works of Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones gave Richardson his biggest box-office windfall, boasts a few spots of knockabout comedy (the country parson sits upon a chocolate pudding, etc.). But for the most part, the sense of humor is the narrow-minded, snobbish sort that …
There's a sense of strain about elongating this wispy tale -- one of Lillian Hellman's many published memories -- to two hours' length; but in that strain, this movie shows its "heart." The gravest problems here are structural -- specifically, the flashbacks, which impart no useful information, which introduce two …
The Los Angeles-based Kentucky Fried Theater ensemble makes its movie debut with strung-together parodies of movies and television (included are an interminable take-off on Bruce Lee and a reasonably amusing shorter one on TV courtroom dramas). These parodies use a grapeshot attack, which is to say they are off target …
Some small effort is made to heat up the drama (the hero has to look on helplessly while his daughter is attacked in slow motion by a pair of skin-crawlingly reptilian rapists), but for the most part this hurried Western shows no appreciation of the emotional meanings in the rubber …
Marty Feldman, making his directorial debut, borrows heavily from others (especially from Mel Brooks, whose fervent love of old movies drives him to rape and pillage them), and he borrows from himself as well (once he uses a joke, he is more than likely to use it again). If he …
A half-deaf, half-lame, and fully retired private detective, at work on a memoir entitled Naked Girls and Machine Guns, is sucked back into a world of plentiful corpses when his former partner turns up at his door, drooling blood. This type of elegy to the obsolete gumshoe is a pretty …
Some philosophical musings on mortality and immortality are woven into a traditionalist sci-fi plot, in the Frankenstein vein, about scientists' congenital urge to play God. It includes an old-fashioned grave-robbing scene, a mystery man (Klaus Kinski, ideally cast) lurking about in the shadows and spying, and a romantic interest (Tina …
Luc Beraud's directorial debut is a comedy about writer's block, and the first half-hour or so establishes it as one of the best movies ever made on the process of writing, a subject which, on past evidence (Dr. Zhivago etc.), has often been suspected of being unfilmable. Very articulate and …