[7] One day in an English village, everyone drops unconscious for several hours. People outside the village discover the phenomenon and investigate. When they step inside the perimeter, they, too, fall unconscious. The terrifying mystery resolves as quickly as it started — everyone simply wakes up, without any noticeable signs of trauma or injury. Or so it seems. A few months later, every child-bearing woman …
[6] George Pal brings H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi story to the big screen, casting Rod Taylor as the British inventor who travels from 1899 centuries into the future to discover humanity has devolved into two primitive races — the monstrous Morlocks and the innocent Eloi. When Taylor discovers the Morlocks are breeding the Eloi as food, he decides to help them launch a rebellion, even …
[6] After their daughter tells them about ‘naked games’ she played with an old man, two parents (Patrick Allen and Gwen Watford) take the old man to court. But they find themselves the unlikely target of the town’s scorn for trying to smear the name of the man’s rich and powerful family. Is their nine-year old daughter (Janina Faye) prepared for harrowing cross-examination and medical …
[8] A surgeon kidnaps young women and removes their faces in hopes of successfully transplanting one on his horribly disfigured daughter in Eyes Without a Face. Released the same season as Hitchcock’s Psycho and years before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, this French film from Georges Franju has earned an interesting place on the timeline of horror film history. Coming after decades of supernatural …
[7] Doris Day stars as a recently married woman who gets lost in the London fog one afternoon. A mysterious voice threatens her life in that mist, and later makes a series of nasty phone calls to her. The caller threatens in a high voice that she’ll be dead inside a month, but as the calls keep coming, everyone begins to think she’s making the …
[7] Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) directs this British giallo flick about a photographer whose ghastly hobby is stalking young women and filming their expressions as he murders them. You could say that Peeping Tom is an early slasher film, the genre that would beget Michael Myers, Fred Krueger, and Jason Voorhees. But it’s actually a much more psychological endeavor — and more impactful for …
[6] Decades before James Cameron sank the Titanic and twelve years before Irwin Allen took us on The Poseidon Adventure, writer/director Andrew L. Stone took a pioneering step into the disaster film genre. While Cameron and Allen certainly had more pyrotechnics at their disposal, Stone does a remarkable job utilizing a real luxury liner and building suspense throughout The Last Voyage‘s brisk 91-minute run-time. In …
[7] Marlon Brando stars in Sydney Lumet’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams Orpheus Descending. (Williams co-wrote the screenplay with Meade Roberts.) Brando plays a young man trying to shed his criminal background and start a new life in a new town. But the new town has three women in it who all find Brando alluring. Joanne Woodward plays the reckless party animal, Maureen Stapleton plays the …
[5] Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde) must be one of the harder characters to pull off in any believable way. So while I admire Paul Massie’s bravery, he wasn’t quite able to convince me. I think it’s primarily because of the weird voice he uses while he plays Dr. Jekyll. And how do we explain the fact that he is bearded as Jekyll, but clean-shaven …
[7] Montgomery Clift stars as a Tennessee Valley Authority officer tasked with convincing a stubborn old woman to leave her family’s home before implementation of a new dam floods her property. Elia Kazan directs, reuniting with Jo Van Fleet (East of Eden) as the old woman. Much of the film was shot on location and I love the setting, captured in Cinemascope and DeLuxe color. The …
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