FIRE AND ICE

Somehow, the animated Ralph Bakshi feature Fire and Ice managed to slip through the cracks, though I can’t imagine it didn’t make the early 1980s cable TV rounds. It’s perfect late-night HBO fare. If I’d seen it back then, I would have embraced it whole-heartedly and probably proclaimed it the best thing I’d ever seen. Or something to that effect.

THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Judging Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much from its first scene, it would be reasonable to assume one was watching a Fellini movie, or at least a reasonable imitation of Fellini. The opening shot of a TWA plane in flight toward Rome, the bustling capital of high style, suggests the dawn of the age of the jet set

HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON

Hatchet for the Honeymoon is not the kind of film to watch for a kill count or ingenious murders. It is the kind of film to watch for paranormal and sartorial phenomena, ghosts, discotheques, mysterious deaths, horrifying old toys, and the narration of a “paranoiac.”

FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION

Even the most mediocre giallo film can serve as a kind of lifestyle guide—especially for those who pine for the life of a 1970’s era Eurotrash jetsetter. There is a downside to that lifestyle, of course, in that, like most of the characters in The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, you would be inherently unlikeable.