Feb 28
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In honour of our resurrected blog, a resurrected review of a film about a resurrection:
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When Andy Brooks gets home from Vietnam, his family and friends can’t help but notice that he is somehow “different”.
They don’t know the half of it…
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
The ABC network must have really loved the bionic man and woman series they aired in the 1970s, since years later they whipped up the television movie Running Delilah. It’s more or less the same idea, but nowhere as fun as it was before.
Feb 13
Although dessert is usually saved for last at the dinner table, The Chocolate War makes for a very satisfying cinematic meal.
…including my contributions to the “Yay! Our website works again!” roundtable:
Baffled! (1973), in which a perky and insistent occultist dragoons a psychic who doesn’t believe in psychics into investigating the weird goings-on at a sinister English manor house…
Castaway (1986), in which Oliver Reed isn’t Tom Hanks and Amanda Donohoe certainly isn’t a volleyball, but being stuck for a year on a desert island still sucks just as much, even when you deliberately set out to do so…
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), in which you can just barely make out a few charred bits of wreckage that sort of resemble J. R. R. Tolkien’s story if you squint at them long enough…
The Man with a Cloak (1951), in which C. Auguste Dupin– who’s really Edgar Allan Poe in disguise– tries to aid a French revolutionary’s girlfriend in saving a cantankerous old man from murder at the hands of his own servants…
Phantasm II (1988), in which the kid from the first film grows up into a different actor, checks out of the mental hospital, and goes all Captain Ahab on the Tall Man’s ass…
Prisoners of the Lost Universe (1983), in which several irritating people are accidentally transported to a parallel Earth in the process of being conquered by John Saxon…
Revenge in the House of Usher (1983), in which Jesus Franco hides the plot outline of the Best Movie Ever ™ under a bad, boring horror flick…
and…
Strange Days (1995), in which I rather belatedly wish you all a happy new year.
I dug deep into film obscurity and came up with Pepper And His Wacky Taxi, and was subsequently reminded why some unknown movies are not only unknown, but should remain unknown.
It’s been a long, long time… but the B-Masters are finally back in our own website. Like most things brought back to life in the movies, we’re missing a few pieces here and there, but that’s no reason we can’t have our Colin Clive moment of triumph. IT’S ALIVE! ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!!
And what better way to celebrate our resurrection than with a Roundtable — our first in a full year? This time our subject is (appropriately enough) movies about coming back from the dead. To start things off, here’s a review of one of the most infamous films about Those Who Return: Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (1980), a.k.a. Gates of Hell.