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Director Jeannot Szwarc has a style that always seems “slow” to me. For example, among their other flaws, his big-screen efforts like Jaws 2 (1978) and Supergirl (1984) are just a little too long and sluggish for me. I love Somewhere in Time (1980), but nobody is going to call it a fast-moving film. One…
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Day of the Animals (1977) is sincere with its science. The opening crawl reminds us that… In June 1974, Drs. F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California startled the scientific world with their finding that fluorocarbon gases used in aerosol spray cans are seriously damaging the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Thus,…
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Universal monster movies from the 1940s have a distinct look. Had I not seen the Paramount logo at the beginning of The Monster & the Girl (1941) from Shout! Factory’s The Universal Horror Collection Vol. 5, I still would have suspected something was different about it. Indeed, this is one of over 700 films that…
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Astronaut Neil Stryker (Glenn Corbett) awakens in a hospital bed following a tumble through space when a failure in his ship’s “transponder” prevents him and his two crew members from identifying their trajectory. He learns he’s been isolated there for two weeks and that his companions died during the accident. With a title like, The…
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It’s been years since I’ve seen King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963) and, until now, I’d never seen the original Japanese version, Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (1962.) It’s found as a bonus feature on the eighth disc of Criterion’s wonderful Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954-1975 collection. Either version you watch, the movie has only gotten better…
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Dan Curtis has always used and re-used plot elements and stories among his various productions; however, few have been as evident as those recycled in The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC just over a month after The Night Strangler aired on ABC. David Norliss (Roy Thinnes) is a copy of Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin)…
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The Beyond (1981) is as straightforward a movie as any… really. In fact, it’s so simple that you might think you’re confused or missing something when watching it. All you need to know is that a young woman named Liza (Catriona MacColl) inherits an old hotel in Louisiana that was built on one of the…
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Sometimes the more outlandish the concept, the more entertaining a movie can be. It’s The Exorcist (nearly a year before it was released) meets Airport (three years after it was released) in a TV movie directed by the man who would later make The Concorde: Airport ’79, David Lowell Rich. Some may find that it…
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What are the chances that either screenwriter Bill Lancaster or director John Carpenter were inspired by a 1973 TV movie called, A Cold Night’s Death, when they made The Thing nine years later? Similarities between the two films are numerous, yet the small screen version lacks something very important that the big screen version has:…
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Because I am taking a different approach to discussing Halloween II (1981) it’s going to sound like I don’t like it. Let me be clear: I love this movie. It’s just that when I watched it recently for the Nightmare Junkhead podcast, its flaws really showed. After watching something so many times, you hope to…
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Classic Horrors Club 