UK-born, Canada-based director Paul Lynch's greatest success to date is the 1980 teen slasher pic "Prom Night," starring Jamie Lee Curtis (fresh off of "Halloween") and Leslie Nielsen, in a straight role. But within the seven years prior to that breakthrough, Lynch made two small-scale, low-budget slice-of-life films, "The Hard Part Begins" (1973) and "Blood …
Continue reading Serious Camp: Paul Lynch Films of the 1970s and ’80s
British director Michael Apted has quite a varied repertoire on his hands. He got his start on the British documentary series "World in Action," from which his popular "Seven Up" series was born; every seven years since 1963, Apted returns to the same group of British people that he began chronicling when they were seven …
There's precious little to say about "Death Valley," the most alarmingly mundane slasher flick I've ever seen. Even Paul Le Mat, who starred in the movie, was pretty tongue-tied about it. "Yeah, that was a little bit too violent for me," Le Mat said when I interviewed him a few weeks ago. "But my scenes …
As many of you know, most of the movies I am covering on this site came to my attention when I was perusing through imdb.com's list of every movie ever made. So far, I have accumulated most of my choices through birthday presents and Amazon.com orders, and coincidentally, three of the films I wound up …
Continue reading Hidden Films Goes to Church: Three Billy Graham-backed Films
"P.K. and the Kid" first came to my attention sometime during the second grade, circa 1988, when it was shown in somewhat frequent rotation on Cinemax. I was already a huge "Sixteen Candles" fan, and as "P.K." stars Molly Ringwald, I was curious about it. I watched one scene that was violent and trashy and …
"Angelo My Love" is actor Robert Duvall's second directorial effort, an in-depth look at New York City's rarely-covered gypsy community, with a wise-cracking twelve year-old kid as its centerpiece. Duvall's 1977 directorial debut, "We're Not the Jet Set" (to be reviewed later on this site), was a documentary about a wealthy Nebraskan rodeo family; "Angelo …
"Portnoy's Complaint," Ernest Lehman's adaptation of Philip Roth's 1969 novel, is--much like two other 1970s movies discussed earlier on this site, "Diary of a Mad Housewife" and "The Choirboys"--a true-blue Time Capsule movie. By now, directors have learned that most attempts to make films out of monologue-driven novels, narrated mostly from the protagonist's head, result …
"The Birthday Party" is William Friedkin's screen adaptation of Harold Pinter's 1958 play, a claustrophobic, frenzied tale of a surly British boarding house lodger terrorized by two interrogators from something called "The Organization." It was one of my favorite plays in college, and the only Pinter film adaptation I could not find on Netflix, so …
UPDATE, April 18, 2012: "The Choirboys" is now available on Netflix Instant. "The Choirboys" is an appallingly offensive film, not least because it squanders the talents of some of the greatest character actors around, including Charles Durning, James Woods, Randy Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr. However, from today's timid, politically correct perspective, it is fascinating …
I rented "Diary of a Mad Housewife" from NYC's Video Room, which has thousands of hard-to-find or out-of-print titles stocked in its warehouse; you call ahead, request the movies, and pick them up in their tiny store on Third Avenue and 80th Street. Even for a movie from 1970, this particular video was in rough …
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