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
I first found out about "Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid" in 1990. I was in the fourth grade and my older brother had just bought me a Leonard Maltin book of movie reviews. As my brother leafed through it, he cracked up uncontrollably at two particular titles. One of them was the Melvin Van Peebles blaxploitation …
Continue reading Troman Holiday: An Interview with “Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid” director John Golden
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 …
It turns out that Wes Parker, first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1964 to 1972, is quite a rare film aficionado. At the onset of our discussion, he recommended I check out "La vérité," the 1960 Brigitte Bardot film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot; "The Music Teacher" (1988), a Belgian drama about two students studying …
Paul Le Mat is still most known for the role of John Milner in "American Graffiti," George Lucas' 1973 coming-of-age classic about a group of 1960s California high school graduates, and it's certainly not an unflattering way to be remembered. Milner is the oldest, coolest kid in the pack (which also included Ron Howard, Richard …
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 …
Hidden Films 