*contains spoilers It was Darren McGavin’s (1922-2006 heart disease) tv portrayal of Hammer in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-59) that followed this film and McGavin is a decided improvement over Bray even though it’s a half hour tv format. The violence is there if not the sex of the Spillane novels. But McGavin’s Hammer again…
Read more The Cult of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (Part Two)
*contains spoilers Author Mickey Spillane (1918-2006 pancreatic cancer) called his writing “the chewing gum of American literature”. I guess he meant once you’ve chewed over it, you could throw it away. It’s disposable literature. Others perhaps wouldn’t be so kind, while others would rate Spillane’s work as better than that. I read Spillane’s first detective…
Read more The Cult of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (Part One)
*contains spoilers Director Frank Perry’s (1930-95 prostate cancer) drama Play it as it Lays (1972) opens in a sanatorium where Tuesday Weld’s character Maria Wyeth is staying. She begins: “If Carter and Helene were to think it happened because I was insane… I say let them…” We don’t know why but the way Maria talks,…
Read more The Cult of Director Frank Perry’s Play it as it Lays (1972)
*contains spoilers Producer and director Michael Laughlin (1943-) has been around since the late 1960s. He produced the highly praised Bryan Forbes (1926-2013 multiple sclerosis) directed film The Whisperers (1967) which earned Dame Edith Evans (1888-1976) an Oscar nomination. He also produced one of director Monte Hellman’s (1932-) finished products Two Lane Blacktop (1971). Raised…
Read more Director Michael Laughlin’s Strange Unfinished Trilogy
*contains spoilers Peter Collinson (1936-80 lung cancer) was a British director who died at the relatively young age of 44. He directed the much lauded and popular The Italian Job (1969) which over the years, when I asked young British fellows what their favourite film was – it always seemed to be The Italian Job.…
*contains spoilers To quote from Revelations in the Bible at around Chapter VIII of John: “…there fell a great star from heaven burning as it were a lamp and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of the waters… and many men died of the waters. Because they were…
Ian Pringle is an Australian writer/director who began his career with a couple of shorts and the short feature Wronsky (1979). His first feature was The Plains of Heaven (1982) which is set in the highlands of Victoria. His follow-up to that was Wrong World (1985) which is a kind of road movie in the…
Read more Writer/Director Ian Pringle on The Prisoner of St. Petersburg and his Cult Career…
*contains spoilers Australian cinema remained in the doldrums for decades after its heady days in the 1930s and it wasn’t until the early 1970s thanks to some funding from the Federal Government that filmmaking got underway again in the country. One of the handful of films which kicked off this renaissance in Aussie filmmaking was…
Read more The First Real Aussie Cult Film was Sandy Harbutt’s Stone
Writer/Director Michael Farkas went to USC to study film. He quickly went on the make his first feature movie Prime Risk (1985) which has become a cult movie. After Prime Risk, he spent several years developing new scripts, then moved from Los Angeles back to Washington D.C. in 1988 where he opened Infocus Communications, a…
Read more Writer/Director Michael Farkas on his Cult Movie Prime Risk
*contains spoilers Following the failure of Revolt of the Zombies, the Halperins made their last interesting movie entitled Nation Aflame (1937). It turns a story by white supremacist Thomas Dixon (1864-1946 cerebral haemorrhage) of A Birth of a Nation fame on its head using several writers to produce an anti-racist film about founders of a…
Read more The Halperin Brothers White Zombie and Aftermath (Part Two)
