There’s a lot of stuff in Angel Town (directed by Eric Karson of Black Eagle fame) that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Olivier Gruner’s presence at Southern California University is good for about two scenes and nothing else. There’s some talk about Gruner training the Olympic team or something. There’s the flashbacks he has to his youth in France where he was treated poorly. And best of all, there’s the scene at the beginning of the movie when Gruner was still in France and a woman screws him in a cemetery! And he still decided to go to America! Read More

Here’s a movie that’s going to satisfy that contingent of gladiator fans that like watching old, short guys near the end of their life strapping on the Roman soldier outfit and battling a bunch of guys half his age and still come out on top. Sure, in the end both of his brothers are killed in the battle, his sister commits suicide, and his father has been accusing him of being a coward and a traitor for most of the movie, but other than that, he came out on top. Read More

I think Opie (Ron Howard) missed an important life lesson from his experiences with his magic dog named Smoke. I know Smoke was magic because every time he finished eating, he would stick his paw out for some dummy to shake. Most dogs would have gone back to eating your mom’s crusty panties after dinner, but not the super duper Smoke! Read More

When you see that this movie is a co-production between Spain and West Germany, it begins to dawn on you that what you are about to see isn’t so much a movie about Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster whupping up on each other, but an experience in awful editing, bad dubbing, non-existent acting, and a storyline that vaguely calls to mind the all-star Godzilla opus, Destroy All Monsters. Of course, this movie isn’t going to be executed anywhere near as skillfully as the surprisingly lackluster Destroy All Monsters. The Spanish and German peoples aren’t very well known for making monster tag-team efforts. The scariest part of all this though is that Dracula vs. Frankenstein is the fourth in a series of nine movies starring Paul Naschy as a werewolf named Waldemar Daninsky, a film character almost as well known as German legends Perry Rhoden and Dr. Mabuse. Read More

Were this any other horror movie where the characters stood around and unconvincingly spewed forth lines and plot points while periodically swiping haplessly at oversized rubber bats suspended on wires as visible as in any Godzilla movie, I would complain about problems involving bad acting, unimaginative direction, a barely explained villain, and an actor playing the villain with such laughably exaggerated gestures and mannerisms that you wonder if he thought this was a Mel Brooks comedy and file it away as just another low budget terror flick that had neither the talent nor the inclination to be anything else. Read More

You don’t have to go any further than the opening credits of this one to know that it’s one of the titans of film noir. Based on a novel written by James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice), the film was directed by Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep). The only thing you may wonder about is that it stars Fred MacMurray. If you only remember Fred from his days inventing Flubber and advising My Three Sons what to do about their gender confusion, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that Fred makes a very convincing murderer, schemer, and dude who was a little too smart for his own good. Read More

I don’t know where all the flying brains were in this movie. If you’ve got yourself an early 1950s movie about a killer brain, it either ought to fly around or have grown to gargantuan size, preferably both. The only thing the brain in this one does is sit in a bunch of dirty water in a fish aquarium! Read More

In spite of the cool painted movie poster that this one features with its team of female commandos in form-fitting uniforms leading an assault on enemy troops while stuff is blowing up in the background and an evil looking guy looks on indifferently, I put off watching this one due to the fact that the front of the DVD proclaimed it not simply The Doll Squad, but as Ted V. Mikels’ The Doll Squad. Read More

For those of us that grew up with a pet seal, this movie is like a welcome trip down memory lane! All of us remember the cans of salmon pilfered from the pantry. Those nights long ago when we would hook up an impromptu shower in the tool shed for our slippery friend seem just like yesterday! And I still can’t play a game of checkers without thinking about how my pet seal would always know the best move to make! I guess all that fish really is great brain food! Read More

Back in the days before there were television miniseries that stretched out over the course of several nights, the only way to tell a really long, bloated story was to make a really long, bloated movie. These movies were called epics and they ranged from the very good like Ben-Hur, to the really awful, like Hawaii. Doctor Zhivago falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, in spite of what all the Zhivago zombies will tell you. It’s a good movie, but not great. Read More