Melbourne director Stephen Amis has been making movies since he was a child. He went to film school on the strength of his Super 8 movies and one of his first features was paid by credit card. His low-budget sci-fi/war genre movie The 25th Reich (2012) is an instant classic which features time travel and…
Read more Director Stephen Amis on making The 25th Reich and The BBQ
*contains spoilers Name: Hope Age: 95 Occupation: Retired Nurse Favorite Movie: Gone With the Wind (1939) Starring: Vivian Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland First Saw It: First saw it by herself when it first came out at the movies at Bondi Junction in Sydney Plot: Epic soap opera about the American…
*contains spoilers Max Carlton’s script for Nightmare in Wax, ingeniously uses for the first time, the Hollywood community as a backdrop to the Wax Museum horror story. It is a film populated by backstabbers, dealmakers, and stupid as well as shallow people. All except Vince Renard, a former Hollywood make-up artist, played by Cameron Mitchell,…
*contains spoilers WANTED – An imaginative writer for publicity work in a waxworks exhibition. So begins Paul Leni’s (1885-1929 blood poisoning, infected tooth) silent film from 1924 entitled Waxworks. Waxworks kicked off the Nightmares in Wax craze and it was one of the first horror anthologies. It’s really not that horrible. The first was another…
*contains spoilers Name: Melanie Age: 46 Occupation: Teacher Favorite Movie: About a Boy (2002) Starring: Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, Rachel Weisz and Nicholas Hoult First Saw It: On DVD at home alone when it first came out Plot: Based on the Nick Hornby novel it tells the story of a self-absorbed bachelor who becomes involved…
*contains spoilers When Jean Renoir’s first movie in America, Swamp Water, was made at 20th Century Fox, Renoir was told off in memos during production by studio head Daryl F Zanuck (1902-79 pneumonia). He accused the director of using too many dolly shots and taking alternate takes of the same scene. He was worrying too…
*contains spoilers Another good movie to see about PTSD is Home of the Brave (1949) which features a black protagonist who is literally paralysed by PTSD from fighting the Japanese in World War II. Based on a play and produced by the socially conscious Stanley Kramer (1913-2001 pneumonia), it is one of the first movies…
Read more Journey’s End and the Horrors of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Part Two)
*contains spoilers One of the first plays and movies to deal with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – Journey’s End by R.C, Sherriff (1896-1975 undisclosed) – has recently been remade as a fine movie. Admirably, the 2017 version of the film has been made in association with Combat Stress, the UK’s leading mental health charity for veterans.…
Read more Journey’s End and the Horrors of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Part One)
Name: Kaleb Age: 18 Occupation: Student Favorite Movie: Gremlins (1984)Starring: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Frances Lee McCain and Corey Feldman First Saw it: On DVD when his uncle babysat him aged nine Plot: An inventor buys his son a Christmas gift from an antique store. The gift, a mogwai, is a cute creature…
*contains spoilers Lash LaRue (1916/17- 1996 emphysema) was the man who taught Harrison Ford (1942-) how to use his whip for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). He was a B-grade cowboy star of the late forties and early fifties who never rose to the heights of Gene Autry (1907-1998 lymphoma) and Roy Rogers (1911-1998…
Cult Film Alley 