*contains spoilers The Lonely Lady is a much better prospect, both as a movie and performance by Pia. The script is by far an improvement on Fake-Out despite its reputation. Incidentally, Matt Cimber was first attached to the project but he was replaced. Based on the Harold Robbins bestseller (1976), The Lonely Lady has long…
*contains spoilers If it weren’t for my respect and obsession as a schoolkid for actor James Franciscus, I might have never known and fallen for Pia Zadora. Ever since Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Franciscus was cool, made even more cool by his evil Paul Diller in Killer Fish (1979) which I saw…
*contains spoilers There is something odd about Frenchman’s Farm (1986), and I mean the place and the movie. It is an isolated farm in the Gold Coast hinterland in Australia and the movie is an isolated movie in that it is a rare ghost/horror/sci-fi movie made in Australia in the mid-80s. It is by no…
* contains spoilers One of my favourite actors of all time is Richard Carlson from It Came from Outer Space (1953). Have you heard of the term Six Degrees of Separation where everyone in the world knows each other through six people knowing each other? For example – and this is eerie: A journalist friend…
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 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 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 As many will already know, Orson Welles’ movie The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was taken out of his hands by RKO studios and over an hour was hacked from it. What remains is still regarded a masterpiece. The same type of thing happened with Jean Renoir’s (1894-1979 heart attack) last American movie The Woman…
*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)
Cult Film Alley 