*contains spoilers The Pet Shop Boys remain a talented synth-pop duo which formed in the early 1980s. They put out a new album in 2020 and have already sold over 100 million records. Initially, the band was afraid to tour and instead the feature film It Couldn’t Happen Here (1988), a title taken from one…
Read more The Almost Unreleasable Movie Starring the Pet Shop Boys
*contains spoilers The H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, if you want to call them that, of Italian director Ivan Zuccon (1972-) are interesting horror. There is a trio of films which I have seen and they comprise of The Shunned House (2003 shot on video), Colour from the Dark (2008) and Herbert West: Re-Animator (2017). The best…
Read more Director Ivan Zuccon’s H.P. Lovecraft Italian Style
*contains spoilers If it weren’t for the fact that the two English language films Janie du Plessis (1962-) featured in were dumped on the market and failed… and the fact she married a loser who more or less tortured her for nearly a decade, the South African model and actress may have had a successful…
Read more The Cult of Janie du Plessis in Alien from L.A. and its “Sequel”
*contains spoilers When we look at the trilogy of the Office of Scientific Investigation (OSI) movies from the early to mid 1950s, we must give credit to the producer Ivan Tors (1916-83 heart attack). Tors was a European émigré, he came from Hungary in 1939, and his name is probably more familiar to those who…
Read more The Cult of The Magnetic Monster and the Office of Scientific Investigation
*contains spoilers In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) we are shown in fictional broad strokes how the Nazis and their leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945 suicide) were interested in the supernatural as a possible source of weaponry – in this case the Ark of the Covenant. This relic which reputedly carried the Ten Commandments was…
Read more The Cult of the Nazi Supernatural in The Devil’s Rock and Others
Dan Fredericks is a local historian and library officer for the Parkes Shire Council in country New South Wales. He has lived in the area for over a decade and knows much of the history of Parkes and its surrounding areas. He is a devotee of the film Sunstruck and has taken an interest in…
Read more Historian Dan Fredericks on the Making of Sunstruck
*contains spoilers When I read a recent article on the internet about the film Sunstruck (1972), I had a vague memory of seeing it as a child on television. And it was a fond memory. This Australian-British co-production was unavailable on DVD in Oz, so I had to order a copy from the United Kingdom.…
*contains spoilers Roy Rene (1891-1954 heart failure) was one of the first great Australian comedians. His character Mo thrived in the 1920s and 30s but he only made one film entitled Strike Me Lucky (1934), a title based on one of his quips. It was in that film that Mo was recorded for posterity with…
Read more Comedian Roy Rene as the Inimitable “Mo” in Strike Me Lucky
*contains spoilers What must be horror actor Robert Englund’s (1947-) best performance outside of the Freddy Krueger franchise has to be the Phantom of the Opera (1989). What appears to be originally a The Cannon Group film, it was inherited by Menahem Golan (1929-2014) under his new aegis as CEO of 21st Century Film Corporation,…
*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)
