*contains spoilers The first killings happen in the first few minutes before Ringo learns the Fuentes Brothers have declared his former town Mexican Territory and do more or less what they like to subjugate the citizens. Ringo’s subliminal anger about all this is shown only by a small twitch in his eye. He is cool…
*contains spoilers Those who are fans of The Dollars Trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) – are fans of the spaghetti western even if they have not seen any others beyond them and the associated movie Once Upon a…
*contains spoilers Who knows who has murdered who? It’s all a mystery as Hauser presses down on Ryan … Is it a frame? Hauser was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award as well and it is probably the best performance of his career as he drinks hard, smokes pot in his office and tops off…
*contains spoilers There are movies that people either absolutely love or hate in equal measure and Norman Mailer’s (1923-2007 renal failure) Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987) has been one of those polarising movies. I love it, and always have since I saw it on VHS back when it was first released in the late 1980s…
*contains spoilers The second serpent film Venom (1981), not to be confused with the 2018 superhero movie, has a great cast of British actors as well as German Klaus Kinski (1926-91 heart attack) and American semi-legend Sterling Hayden (1916-86 prostate cancer) in his last film appearance. What is basically a siege movie, with a snake…
Read more The Cult of Actor Sam Chew Jr. in Rattlers (1976) Part Two
*contains spoilers Most people probably prefer the Anaconda (1997) movie and its sequels and there’s no denying the original is quite a good one, but I have three snake tales that I can watch over again and still get a thrill. The first is the film Rattlers (1976), which starts off with a couple of…
Read more The Cult of Actor Sam Chew Jr. in Rattlers (1976) Part One
*contains spoilers Another movie, albeit with a computer on a smaller scale, is the forgotten Australian thriller Crosstalk (1982). Here an eavesdropping computer plays peeping tom to a murder in what is a kind of Rear Window with computers and one that was well ahead of its time. In Crosstalk, it is a privately produced…
Read more The Supercomputer Cult of Colossus and Crosstalk (Part Two)
*contains spoilers Name: Sienna Age: 14 Occupation: High School StudentFavourite Movie: My Girl (1991)Starring: Anna Chlumsky, Macauley Culkin, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Ackroyd First Saw It: With her grandmother on DVD one night on the couch aged ten or eleven. Plot: A coming of age story of a young girl living in suburban Pensylvania…
*contains spoilers Penny finds Steiner’s office ransacked and the killer attempts to strangle her but she uses a blunt instrument and escapes him/her/neither. Here the music, or lack of it, drives the tension. Is a life without music/sex worth living? This element seems built in to the tension of the sequence. Of course, after another…
Read more Craig Lahiff’s Aussie Hitchcockian Double Bill (Part Two)
*contains spoilers Coda (1987) aka Symphony of Evil aka Deadly Possession and Strangers (1991) are two films directed by South Australian director Craig Lahiff (1947-2014). The titles of his movies were often one word and the pair of movies are often described by critics as sub-Hitchcock. I think they deserve more praise than that, considering…
Read more Craig Lahiff’s Aussie Hitchcockian Double Bill (Part One)
