Jack Palance

[6] Elia Kazan makes a concerted effort to be less ‘theatrical’ and more ‘cinematic’ with Panic in the Streets, a New Orleans thriller about a policeman and a doctor searching the streets for a killer infected with pneumonic plague. Richard Widmark plays the doctor and Paul Douglas plays the cop. They’re forced to work together and begrudgingly do so for a while, but they eventually …

[6] After a city-wide blackout allows their escape, four criminal psychotics terrorize a new doctor and his family. The script is wobbly well into act three, and I’m not all too happy with how the escapees are characterized, but Alone in the Dark still pulls out a few decent horror sequences. The scene where the babysitter is terrorized by a knife through the mattress is …

[5] Burgess Meredith stars as Dr. Diabolo, a sideshow barker who gives daring patrons a glimpse at their untimely demises in this horror anthology flick from Britain’s Amicus Productions (ever the poor man’s Hammer Studios). The four featured tales include a mind-controlling cat, a secret society of androids, a killer piano, and dueling collectors of all things Edgar Allan Poe. I expected more from venerable …

[9] It’s hard to believe we once lived in a time when superhero movies didn’t monopolize the multiplexes. Such a time was the summer of 1989, when Warner Brothers’ very first big-screen version of Batman was due to be released. Many declared the film a folly. Indeed, a superhero film hadn’t been successful since Superman II nearly ten years earlier and most of the world …