*contains spoilers A quick look at Lucio Fulci’s (1927-96 complications of diabetes) and Umberto Lenzi’s (1931-2017 undisclosed) The Houses of Doom movies otherwise known as La case maledette. These four films are probably only best known to completists of Fulci and Lenzi, they are an interesting part of their work, but strictly speaking they are…
Read more Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi’s The Houses of Doom
*contains spoilers Her Hollywood sojourn over, Hopkins sold her L.A. home to David O. Selznick (1902-65 heart attack) and moved to her New York apartment. There her parties continued with writers like John O’Hara (1905-70 heart failure) and Edward R. Murrow (1908-65 lung cancer, three packs a day), whose documentary on Hollywood McCarthyism in 1953…
Read more The Cult of Miriam Hopkins and Savage Intruder (Part Two)
*contains spoilers Savage Intruder (1970) aka The Comeback aka Hollywood Horror House was the last movie for 1930s and 40s actress and Academy Award nominee Miriam Hopkins (1902-72 heart attack). Like Joan Crawford (1905-77 heart attack, maybe cancer), Hopkins had a long-running feud with Bette Davis (1908-89 breast cancer) and like those two actresses movies…
Read more The Cult of Miriam Hopkins and Savage Intruder (Part One)
*contains spoilers Now is a good time to start talking about the film Howson made around the same period as producer and writer – Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1988). This movie could have been a very bitter one, but I think it was written before the fallout of Backstage and anyway I get the idea…
Read more Frank Howson and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Part Two)
*contains spoilers When we talk about the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, most people might think of the 70s painting by Gottfried Heinwein (1948-), which features Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957 throat cancer), Marilyn Monroe (1926-62 barbiturate overdose), James Dean (1931-55 car accident) and Elvis Presley (1935-77 heart attack) in a late night diner. That painting in turn…
Read more Frank Howson and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Part One)
*contains spoilers “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree”. These are the opening lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834 heart failure linked to opium use) poem Kubla Khan, inspired by Chinese history. Since this is where the name Xanadu came from for the movie musical, it is only fitting the poem was composed and…
And a word or two on Maslin Beach (1997), set on the eponymous nude beach in Adelaide. It’s your masterpiece in terms of script and direction. The nudity is not coy. Did you originally set out to make what is essentially a “European” movie? Maslin Beach was my ‘coming of age’, and the transition from…
You co-produced The Dreaming (1988) with Craig Lahiff and with Anthony I. Ginnane as executive producer. It stars Penny Cook who passed away recently. She worked with Lahiff, who is also gone, on the very good Hitchcockian slasher/horror Coda (1987). How would you sum them up? You must have known Lahiff well. The period 1984…
As the producer, what was the inspiration for Centrespread (1981)? How did it begin? In 1978, I began working with Newfilms in Adelaide, which was a production company owned by Justin Milne and Geoffrey Simpson. I learned my trade production managing documentaries, corporate films and commercials. Geoffrey and I constantly talked about making a feature…
*containers spoilers Now for The Dreaming (1988), which Wayne also produced, or The Nightmare as it should be known for its subject matter and slightly troubled production. It’s an epic! Well, for its limited budget of apparently just over two million, it is. From the opening credits, which has a shot taken by helicopter as…
Cult Film Alley 