*contains spoilers Name: Bec. Age: 49 Occupation: Marketing and Communication Agency Owner Favourite Movie: The Blue Lagoon (1980) Starring: Christopher Atkins, Brooke Shields and Leo McKern First Saw It: I was ten and saw it at the movies but I don’t remember who I was with. Plot: A couple of children shipwrecked on a tropical…
Read more My Cult Movie: “I wanted Christopher Atkins as my boyfriend…”
*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
*contains spoilers Name: Myrna Age: 79 Occupation: Retired Day Care Provider Favourite Movie: Imitation of Life (1959)First Saw It: As a teenager at the Savoy Cinema in Colombo, Sri Lanka with a friend after work one SaturdayStarring: Lana Turner, Sandra Dee, Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner Plot: Director Douglas Sirk directs Fanny Hurst’s story of…
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 Is Mulholland Drive (2001) a load of old cobblers? That director David Lynch has taken a rejected tv series pilot and added a number of new scenes and re-edited it, suggests that if it is a load of cobblers cobbled together… oh, what a sublime load of old cobblers it is! This article…
*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)
*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)
