Made without either Menahem Golan or Yoram Globus, the Cannon film The Human Shield understandably won’t completely satisfy fans of the company.
No Go-Go boys? No go
Jan 13
Oh, Falk!
Jan 3
Just before getting his first Oscar nomination, Peter Falk appeared in the Canadian film The Bloody Brood, and, like, it’s cool, daddy-o.
One Last Update for 2025
Dec 30
Thus concludes an unusually busy year for reviewing first-run films– and thus also concludes my coverage of the Hammer Dracula series, which I’ve been writing about intermittently for an incredible 25 years:
Appointment with Fear (1985), in which there’s no appointment, with fear or anything else, but I do get the astral-projecting serial killer whose absence so annoyed me in The Astral Factor a few months ago…
Bad Moon (1996), in which man’s best friend is werewolf’s worst enemy…
Blood Tide (1982), in which treasure hunters on an Aegean island unwittingly resurrect the gill man which the locals used to worship as a god until about A.D. 500, but the results have more in common with The Wicker Man than with Creature from the Black Lagoon…
Dracula, A.D. 1972 (1972), in which Hammer tries to get hip, but ends up proving instead how square it had really become…
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), in which they try again by keeping the modern setting, but pivoting to a faintly Bond-flavored conspiracy thriller format…
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), in which the studio’s last and strangest hail-Mary gambit entails teaming up with Shaw Brothers to make a kung fu horror film…
Frankenstein (2025), in which the passion project of a lifetime yields disappointingly good-enough results…
and…
The Running Man (2025), in which what ought to have been the perfect dystopia for the present era of tacky malevolence turns out even more disappointingly good enough.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
A super superhero
Dec 24
The Korean superhero movie Psychokinesis defies conventions in a number of aspects in order to be more believable than usual.
A humor famine
Dec 14
For those who don’t yet know the horror that is Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, The Starving Games will prove to be a very informative – and deadly – lesson.
A “sequel” to no other movie in existence, The Executioner Part II is an amusingly shoddy exercise that must have taken grindhouse audiences aback upon seeing it.
While Christmas In Wonderland might not be the worst family Christmas movie ever made, it may be the one with the weirdest cast.
If you think that Finns collaborating with Belgians could only lead to no good, Santa’s Magic Crystal (a.k.a. THE MAGIC CRYSTAL) will confirm your fears.
…although I did inadvertently wind up with an interesting “Teens vs. Tyranny” double feature:
The Demon (1979), in which slasher mania spreads to South Africa, of all places…
Dinosaurus! (1960), which feels simultaneously like the last giant monster movie of the 1950’s and the first of the 1960’s, even though neither is really true…
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 (2015), in which splitting the book in half yields its predictable usual result, ending the series with sound and fury signifying not nearly as much as it should have…
The Long Walk (2025), in which a story that Stephen King wrote as a college freshman in 1967 feels a lot timelier today than it probably would have back then…
One Exciting Night (1922), in which D.W. Griffith’s entry into spooky house territory does nothing whatsoever to mitigate his modern reputation as That Racist Assclown…
and…
Ritual of Evil (1970), in which a failed pilot for a Fear No Evil spinoff series becomes a slightly disappointing sequel instead.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
A big shot
Nov 4
Bleak but captivating, Shot Caller is a prison drama more convincing than most other efforts of this genre.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.