In the late 1960s and early 70s, a bizarre alliance between the Filippino movie company Hemisphere and the American exploitation outfit Independent International yielded a series of weirdly interconnected horror movies, most of which work the word Blood into the title. The Filippino items are strangely fascinating vampire and mad scientist pictures with oddball colour effects and a mix of naive serial-style thrills and extreme-for-the-era sex and gore; the American efforts, from director Al Adamson, are shoddier, thrown together from offcuts of previous pictures, and are lead-paced but nevertheless curiously appealing. Gaze in awe at mutant killer trees, slobbering hunchbacked servants, faded matinee idols, stripper-turned-actress heroines with concrete blonde hairdos, evil dwarves, John Carradine or Lon Chaney, footage cut in from completely different films, Dracula and Frankenstein meeting hippies and bikers, red filters when the vampires attack, chanting natives! Plus lots of exclamation marks! Plus lurid trailers! In The Blood Drinkers a bald vampire in New Wave sunglasses tries to revive his dead girlfriend using her twin sister's heart. This is an unusual vampire effort with special tints to indicate normality (lovely pastel colour), night-time and the presence of evil (blue shadow) and vampires acting viciously (cherry blood red). Plus Basra the Bat! --Kim Newman
A lively biopic of French artist Toulouse Lautrec directed by John Huston. Deformed in early age when his legs stop growing dwarfish Parisian Lautrec (Jose Ferrer who also plays Lautrec's father) goes on to become one of the masters of Impressionism. 'Moulin Rouge' is famous for its incredibly exhilarating twenty minute can-can sequence which sets the tone for a series of high energy dance routines.
The mansion... the madness... the maniac... no escape. Starring Warhol Factory favourite Mary Woronov as well as cameos by other Superstars SILENT NIGHT BLOODY NIGHT is a bizarre tale of an escaped lunatic who terrorizes a small New England town and has strange dealings with the inhabitants of an old mansion which is up for sale.
Xena--you gotta love her: after all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from Sam Raimi's head in March 1995, to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules, a 5' 10" high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages.Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurk doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty--and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled via the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard Gabrielle, her constant companion. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits, as the duo confront gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires, at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological cross-roads where touchy-feelly Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. --Honey GlassIn the second series (first aired US 1996-97) Xena and Gabrielle (plus goofy side-sidekick the Joxer) meet the Fates, the (surprisingly Gothic) Bacchae, Ulysses, Cupid, Goliath, Santa Claus and (perhaps) the baby Jesus, as well as full-on Xena foe Julius Caesar and her former healer-mentor M'Lila. While filming this series, Xena actress Lucy Lawless was thrown by a horse on Tonight with Jay Leno, and injured: hence a sudden slew of swapped-body stories (Callisto, Autolycus and Gabrielle each have to mimic Xena for an episode), while domestic comedy and/or parody stories contribute to the medically advisable action-lite plot lines. Meanwhile, Callisto murders Gabrielle's hubby-to-be, and the narrative tension deepens. --Honey Glass
Xena--you gotta love her: after all, she could snap your neck just by straightening her knees. She sprang fully armed from producer Sam Raimi's head in March 1995, to flesh out an otherwise routine episode of the television series Hercules, a high-kicking, horse-riding, chakram-throwing ancient-Greek-warrior princess, who mustered armies the way some women shop for shoes, turning heroes against one another as gleefully as she laid waste to sweet little villages. Except that somewhere beneath that straight dark fringe and hard-boiled leather breastplate lurks doubts, feelings, even a soul. She was so popular on Hercules her spin-off was an instant certainty--and pretty soon the subtext of her own series was unfolding. Xena is on a journey from evil to good, but this can only be enabled by the companionship of bossy redhead scribe/bard, Gabrielle, her constant friend. Set in a lush New Zealand doubling for the pagan Mediterranean, as misruled by Ares, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the rest of the Mount Olympus gang, Xena: Warrior Princess recounts these exploits, as the duo confronts gods, monsters, warlords, idiots and anachronisms, as well as their own flaws and desires, at the hilarious and sometimes unsettling mythological crossroads where touchy-feely Californian feminism meets high-camp chop-socky pantheism seasoned with the Way of Peplum Tao. In the second series (first aired US 1996-97) Xena and Gabrielle (plus goofy sidekick the Joxer) meet the Fates, the (surprisingly Gothic) Bacchae, Ulysses, Cupid, Goliath, Santa Claus and (perhaps) the baby Jesus, as well as full-on Xena foe Julius Caesar and her former healer-mentor M'Lila. While filming this series, Xena actress Lucy Lawless was thrown by a horse on Tonight with Jay Leno, and injured: hence a sudden slew of swapped-body stories (Callisto, Autolycus and Gabrielle each have to mimic Xena for an episode), while domestic comedy and/or parody stories contribute to the medically advisable action-lite plotlines. Meanwhile, Callisto murders Gabrielle's hubby-to-be, and the narrative tension deepens. --Honey Glass
A pair of crooks discovers that after ten years in jail a department store has been built over the site of their buried loot. However the store is struggling and one of the owners is all too willing to have the crooks burn the store to the ground.
Farewell To Arms (Dir. Frank Borzage 1932): Ernest Hemingway's tragic wartime romance comes to vivid life in this classic 1932 film starring Oscar winners Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. The cataclysm of WW1 sets the stage for an impassioned story of star-crossed love between a daring American ambulance driver (Cooper) and an English nurse (Hayes) in an army hospital. The tumult of war conspires to push the pair together and then wrench them apart in what becomes an ultimate tes
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