The comedy trilogy of my childhood was Animal House, Caddyshack and Stripes. R-ratings weren’t strictly enforced, and I had seen this trilogy by the age of 13. I had to see it with Siskel and Ebert giving it good reviews. The film began as a Cheech and Chong vehicle in…
Robert Siodmak is a name you never hear in film history, but his short American career includes some amazing work. He dabbled in the film industry in Germany, fleeing Nazism to Paris and then fleeing Nazism again to California. After directing “Son of Dracula”, Siodmak found his niche in the…
Want a Hitchcock film that spells out what makes for a typical Hitchcock film? It’s “The 39 Steps.” It’s got the innocent man wrongly accused and a MacGuffin, an irrelevant plot device around which all the action is centered. Hitchcock spends a lot of time introducing us to Mr. Memory,…
If there was a movie that was supposed to be dead at the box office, it was “All The President’s Men.” A movie about government. A movie about newspapers. A movie about recent history where everyone who would be interested in these subjects already knows the ending. It made back…
Richard Donner is one of my all-time favorite directors and completely underappreciated in the industry. I could never understand why. I used to think it was because he spent so many years directing television that the industry didn’t give him his due respect. Not a single Academy Award nomination. Not…
Each year, television is inundated with Christmas movies, and some channels play them like radio stations play Christmas music – wall to wall. I rarely see “Scrooge,” by far my favorite version of the famed Charles Dickens classic, “A Christmas Carol”. There are tons of them, mind you, but to…
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic made quite a few people remember the many outbreak films Hollywood has made. It made me remember “Demolition Man”. Of course, it wasn’t for the main plot point of the movie – a violent cop and a violent criminal are cryogenically frozen, and are brought back…
When a comedy has 6 sequels, each of which got progressively worse until the final in the series hardly even made it onto a theater screen, it’s hard to judge the first one fairly, especially since it never would’ve happened without the classic film “The Right Stuff”. During the filming…
In 1982, I was a big fan of movies I couldn’t possibly have seen from the 30s and 40s. We actually had a VHS VCR in the house, but the small video store near my house had very few movies from that era. But I read about them in tons…
Every once in a while, you find a film from youth that is full of great scenes with great actors who most people didn’t know at the time, but today has the makings of a classic. “Heaven Help Us” follows a group of Catholic School boys through pranks, dates and…