*contains spoilers The British playwright Joe Orton (1933-1967 murdered) had the shortest of careers in the mid-1960s before his long-time lover Kenneth Halliwell (1926-67 sleeping pill overdose) hit him nine times on the forehead with a hammer in their London bedsit and then committed suicide. It is a part of the legend of Orton that…
Read more The Cult of Playwright Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane
*contains spoilers It could be said that writer and director Dennis Potter’s (1935-94 pancreatic cancer) movie Secret Friends (1991) is about the evolution of schizophrenia in the individual from childhood, where the beginnings are laid in the mind and, finally, how it hatches into adolescent or adult madness. It is also about the individual coming…
Read more The Schizophrenic Cult of Director Dennis Potter’s Secret Friends (1991)
*contains spoilers Different actors were used for Ida’s next film, which she directed and co-wrote, entitled Outrage (1950). This film was only the second movie about rape ever released in modern day Hollywood under the rule of The Production Code after Johnny Belinda (1948), which won actress Jane Wyman (1917-2007 in sleep) an Oscar. The…
Read more The Cult of Director Ida Lupino’s The Filmakers Movies (Part Two)
*contains spoilers British-born actress and director Ida Lupino (1918-95 stroke and colon cancer) lived her the life the hard way which ended in alcoholic oblivion… Yet she was the first woman in Hollywood to direct herself in a movie and the first to direct a film noir. Many of the movies she directed had a…
Read more The Cult of Director Ida Lupino’s The Filmakers Movies (Part One)
*contains spoilers Director John Sturges’s (1910-92 emphysema) Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) was a film which helped introduce martial arts into mainstream American movies and it is also a film which looks at racism and xenophobia in a way that remains relevant in the United States to this day. Thankfully, to a lesser degree.…
Read more The Cult of Xenophobia in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Dean Bennett (1963-) is a bit of a legend in South Australia as he was a young film-maker who inspired many other young film-makers through his impressive award-winning Super 8 short films which played local festivals in the late 1970s. His ingenuity in creating exciting stunts and fiery special effects on the pocket money he…
Read more Teen Movie Prodigy and Stunt Man Dean Bennett on his Cult Film Career and Carrie Fisher…
*contains spoilers The films of Australian filmmaker Murray Fahey (no info) are very low budget but couldn’t be more diverse. Of the four movies which impressed me most to write about – two are comedies and two are horror movies… And they are all original to some degree. For example, his comedy/drama Sex is a…
Read more The Cult Movies of Writer and Director Murray Fahey
*contains spoilers Call it youthful naivety, call it sexual ambivalence or confusion but when I first saw Eat the Rich (1987) several times in my late teens as an usher during a film festival, I really thought actress Lanah Pellay (1959-) was a woman, or I thought she was a man… Ummm… Alan Pellay or…
Read more The Cult of Actress Lanah Pellay in Eat the Rich (1987)
*contains spoilers The best Charlie Chan movie of all has a creepy association with the “unsolved” murders of The Zodiac Killer which began in San Francisco back in the late 1960s and would baffle police well into the 1970s and onwards. As they say: Everyone loves a mystery – and the Chan movies offered that…
Read more The Cult of The Zodiac Killer and Charlie Chan at Treasure Island
