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Before Burt Reynolds went on to have a legendary and illustrious career on the silver screen, he first made his reputation doing television. He appeared in a myriad of shows between 1959 and 1972. He had one-episode roles in such classic shows as "The Twilight Zone," Erle Stanley Gardner's "Perry Mason," and Lee Marvin's "M Squad." Yet one of his most memorable recurring roles was arguably in Charles Marquis Warren's western drama, "Gunsmoke" (based on John Meston and Norman Macdonnell's radio series of the same name), which ran on CBS for an outstanding 20 (!) years between 1955 and 1975. Compared to today's TV Westerns, which are lucky if they last more than two seasons, that's an astonishing accomplishment for the unapologetically honest series.

Out of those 20 seasons, Reynolds starred in three, from 1962 to 1965, as Quint Asper, a half-white and half-Comanche blacksmith, introduced as the member of Angela Clarke's Topsanah's tribe...

When "Gunsmoke" premiered on CBS in 1955, the television series already had a fan following due to its success as a radio show. This, however, presented a bit of a problem given that the radio cast would not be carrying over to the live-action iteration. The biggest challenge? Selling viewers on a version of U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon who didn't possess the unmistakable, sonorous voice of William Conrad.

James Arness was hardly a neophyte when he stepped in front of the camera to play Dillon. He'd appeared in numerous big-screen Westerns and had played the title monster in Christian Nyby's "The Thing from Another World" (which would later be remade by John Carpenter as "The Thing"). At 6'7", he was a commanding figure, though not exactly warm or charismatic. CBS thought Arness might take some getting used to, and it wasn't exactly patient enough to wait for him to grow on viewers.

Whenever Roger Ebert saw a limp Hollywood remake of a classic movie, the esteemed film critic used to lament that studios had it all wrong. They shouldn't be redoing movies that were already brilliant, but, rather, revisiting films with promising premises that, for whatever reason, didn't work the first time out. While this may sound like perfectly reasonable advice, studios typically aren't keen to throw money at projects that already failed once. That's how executives get fired.

This is how we get unwanted, undercooked remakes like 2006's "The Omen," 2012's "Total Recall," and 2014's "RoboCop." The originals were smart, zeitgeisty genre flicks from top-notch directors, while the second go-rounds were sweaty retreads with no point of view and, thus, no reason for being -- but at least the execs who greenlit these movies could defend them on the grounds of brand recognition. Had they gone down in flames with a remake of,...

Picture this: a group of researchers in Antarctica discover an alien spaceship buried deep within the ice. Despite the fact that it's the dead of winter, the researchers decide to thaw the insides of the craft and chance upon a creature estimated to have crash-landed 20 million years ago. This creature, or thing, covertly assumes the appearance of a crew member upon revival, overwriting their personality while retaining their memories. The creature repeats the process over and over, slowly dwindling the number of humans on the base by violently overtaking their identities. By the time the research team realizes the truth, it is too late, as this alien parasite now looks just like one of them, pretending to be human...

This is the core premise of "Who Goes There?," a 1938 sci-fi horror novella by John W. Campbell, who initially published it under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart. Campbell's story expanded...

There are few horror films as thoroughly chilling as John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece "The Thing." Loosely based on the John W. Campbell novella "Who Goes There?", which was previously adapted as the 1951 Christian Nyby film "The Thing From Another World," "The Thing" follows a research team in the arctic as they battle with a mysterious alien being that had been frozen in the ice. While the movie wasn't a hit when it first came out (in large part because it was a disturbing bummer with an enigmatic ending), "The Thing" has come to be thought of as a true horror classic. 

But "The Thing" so many of us know and love today was almost a very different movie, as Carpenter realized during editing that the pacing was far too slow and he needed to cut some dialogue and add more monsters (a great call). He had originally planned for a pretty...

This post contains spoilers for "The Thing."

There are several stand-out sequences in John Carpenter's cult classic "The Thing." The opening itself, where a Norwegian helicopter pursues a sled dog and attempts to shoot it, immediately sets the tone for this morbid tale enmeshed in distrust and paranoia. What initially feels like a senseless attempt at violence (or a classic case of humans behaving irrationally due to extreme isolation) is gradually revealed to be a sincere endeavor to rid the world of an evil force that can morph into people we know and trust. The inhabitants of the Antarctic research station feel helpless in the face of such a perfect organism — one that can mimic, adapt, and deceive at will — but the most cynical among them, MacReady (Kurt Russell), comes up with a litmus test to prove everyone's humanity and lure out the pretender.

The method employed is rather crude,...

James Wan produces the horror series Teacup, set for October 2024, which feels very inspired by The Thing. Teacup adapts Robert R. McCammon's Stinger, but moves the setting from the desert to rural Georgia. Teacup will modernize Stinger, focusing on the family drama and scaling back to a more intimate framework.

James Wan is producing an upcoming horror series that I believe will be a worthy successor to The Thing. I'm one of the biggest fans of John Carpenter's movie output there is, with The Thing being my personal favorite. This 1982 chiller stranded twelve men in an Antarctic research outpost with a shape-shifting alien monster. Critics ripped the film to pieces upon release, but over time, it's come to be recognized as one of the best horror movies ever made.

I'm still disappointed a Thing sequel by Carpenter never happened, though rumors suggest the filmmaker is involved with a possible Blumhouse reboot.

As "The Twilight Zone" was nearing the end of its third season in 1962, creator Rod Serling was feeling the strain of having to generate over half of the series' scripts. Though Serling was fortunate to have a regular network outlet through which he could prick the increasingly troubled consciences of an American public confronted with the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, and the military's expanding involvement in the Vietnam conflict, he was, off-camera at least, a very funny man. He liked to laugh. And if he had his druthers, he'd have a separate network outlet to make television viewers laugh as well.

So, late in the third season, Serling revisited "Mr. Bevis," a pilot premise he'd attempted in the first season of "The Twilight Zone," and gave it broader comedic spin. The result was "Cavender Is Coming," which, if it pleased his CBS overlords, would've become a sitcom vehicle...

The Twilight Zone remains one of the most influential TV series of all time. The anthology format provided a wealth of storytelling opportunities that series creator Rod Serling and his team transformed into dark, witty parables about the human condition. The sci-fi horror trappings made a perfect hook, and resulted in timeless episodes like "It's a Good Life," "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." However, even the best series have a few misfires here and there, particularly in anthology shows where the quality can vary greatly from episode to episode. Furthermore, the ironic twist endings that became the show's signature require a good deal of narrative weaving to work the way they should.

Not all of them reached that goal, and some of them generated a great deal of bafflement in their efforts to work out the various narrative kinks. While the best episodes...

Tackling a horror remake is a dicey prospect. On the one hand, this genre is a hallowed ground; fans do not want their favorite films and franchises to be toyed with! On the other hand, some of the early classics might truly be great, but a later remaining could top it with a different angle. 1942's Cat People is an undeniably effective and wonderful chiller with its eerie, moody aesthetics, but Brian De Palma's 1982 remake more than earns its place by flipping the script entirely and turning the whole premise into a supernatural erotic thriller. John Carpenter's remake, re-adaptation, whatever you want to call it, of Who Goes There? is such a massive improvement over the original The Thing that it's as if only deep genre fans even remember Christian Nyby's original. Some think that it's sacrilegious to tamper with monumental genre cornerstones, but we'd be lying...

Word of a remake of John Carpenter's 1986 bonkers action flick "Big Trouble in Little China" came out as early as 2015. The remake was set to star Dwayne Johnson, presumably playing Jack Burton, the character previously played by Kurt Russell. Johnson reportedly wanted John Carpenter to be involved in the remake, but the director was never officially invited to anything. "I only know what I read in the papers," he said. Carpenter has been famously indifferent to other filmmakers remaking his movies, once saying that he loves it when it happens, as he gets paid for not having to do anything. Three years later, in 2018, it was announced that the new "Big Trouble" would be a sequel and not a remake, but such definitions have become hazy in a nostalgia-driven marketplace. The film's producer, Hiram Garcia, referred to the new film as a "continuation," rather than a sequel. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

The Thing starts slow, but once it gets going, it's a thrilling watch with groundbreaking practical effects that still hold up today. Characters in The Thing are underdeveloped archetypes, lacking the depth and complexity seen in other classic horror films. The bleak, cynical worldview of The Thing sets it apart from more optimistic sci-fi films like E.T., making it a tough rewatch in today's darker world.

John Carpenter’s The Thing is a sci-fi horror masterpiece that still holds up to a rewatch today – but there are a couple of minor flaws that stick out on rewatches. The Thing marked the second big-screen adaptation of John W. Campbell’s chilling 1938 novella Who Goes There? after 1951’s The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby. Much like the 1951 version, Carpenter’s The Thing takes place at a remote research station that gets infiltrated by a malevolent extraterrestrial force determined...

Remakes have always been and will always be a tricky proposition. You could have something as pure and wonderful as 1982’s The Thing, which is objectively better than the revered Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby version, but be trapped in purgatory for way too long before it is decided that its proper and loved. There’s a bunch that are better in different ways or at least thoroughly enjoyable in their own right like John Carpenter’s masterpiece, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and of course David Cronenberg’s The Fly. While you can argue the horror vs sci fi merits of any of these movies, their quality can’t be disputed. When it comes down to what you can or can’t remake, I think the gloves are off at this point. There’s very few sacred cows left and sometimes a remake can help. Something...

In its credits, John Carpenter's 1982 alien invasion film "The Thing" is based on John W. Campbell's 1938 novella "Who Goes There?," but owes far more of a creative debt to Christian Nyby's 1951 adaptation "The Thing from Another World." Carpenter loved Nyby's film, and even featured a clip of it in his 1978 horror film "Halloween." "The Thing" notoriously bombed on its initial release, a failure some chalk up to the presence of Steven Spielberg's ultra-sentimental "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" which opened only two weeks before. It seems that audiences wanted sweetness and wonderment in 1982, and likely felt the paranoia, death, violence, and gloppy ooze in Carpenter's film to be too much of a bleak throwback.

In the ensuing decades, genre fans rescued "The Thing," coming to appreciate its eerie, dreadful atmosphere, its harder-than-stone characters, and its amazing, amazing practical creature effects (provided by Rob Bottin). In 2024, "The Thing" is...

It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but humans weren’t always at the top of the food chain. And with our ancestors being preyed upon by larger mammals and even our fellow humanoids, it stands to reason that we’d develop a generalized fear of the dark. That’s why it makes sense that cold places where the sun doesn’t routinely rise are naturally suited for spooky stories.

This is precisely what showrunner Issa López had in mind when she came up with HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, a brand-new murder mystery that returns the anthology show to its horrific roots. And with new episodes dropping weekly, we’ve decided to help viewers get an additional fix of frigid frights by recommending six arctic thrillers to watch after Td: Night Country.

As usual, don’t forget to comment below with your own arctic favorites if you think we missed a particularly spooky one.

Issa López's "True Detective: Night Country," the fourth season of the pulp crime series created by Nic Pizzolatto, kicks off with one heck of a hook. Scientists holed up at the Tsalal Research Station on the outskirts of Ennis, Alaska (which is itself on the outskirts of civilization in the sparsely populated state) are winding down after a long day of doing ... well, whatever it is they do up there (the first episode does not make this clear). They're doing laundry, making dinner, settling in for a movie ("Ferris Bueller's Day Off") with a bowl of microwave popcorn, and evidently content to be where they are.

And then, in an instant, they're not there anymore.

A delivery man who shows up with supplies, expecting help in unloading his truck, wanders through the station seemingly seconds after the sequence we've just observed (Matthew Broderick is still rocking out to The...

John Wayne is arguably the greatest actor of his generation. Best known for embodying the macho Western movie hero, one of the most decorated actors in history only got one Academy Award recognition for that portrayal. However, before venturing into villainous roles, he embraced a challenging character that redefined his range and cemented a new legacy. No Western onscreen feud surpasses the fiery father-son conflict between John Wayne's tyrannical Thomas Dunson and Montgomery Clift's groundbreaking performance as independent-minded Matthew Garth in Howard Hawks' 1948 masterpiece, Red River. But nestled within the film's enduring legacy there is a secret in its saddlebag — an alternate ending lost for years and only recovered decades later. During production, dissatisfied with the pacing, Hawks and editor Christian Nyby crafted a 133-minute version, longer than the 127-minute theatrical release, featuring book-style transitions and a more contemplative tone. This version of the film was initially available but...

On Thursday, John Carpenter was the guest On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to discuss his latest project “John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams”, a six-episode horror anthology series available to stream on Peacock.

https://www.peacocktv.com/watch-online/tv/john-carpenters-suburban-screams/8006432878975950112/seasons/1

The host, a huge film nerd, revealed to the audience that his go to comfort movie food is 1982’s The Thing. Reviled by critics and cinema goers at the time for being too gory and violent, while expecting a remake of Christian Nyby’s and Howard Hawks’s black & white version of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, the movie was almost forgotten… until sci-fi and horror fans decided differently. In the decades since, the film saw new life with VHS, Laserdisc and Blu-ray/DVD. The film has a killer score composed by Ennio Morricone, organic, non-cgi effects from Rob Bottin and one of the best posters ever from Drew Struzan.

In the fifth season episode of "The Twilight Zone," called "The Masks", an elderly millionaire named Jason Foster (Robert Keith) has gathered his daughter, her husband, and their two adult children for a Mardi Gras gathering. Jason, attended by his doctor (Willis Bouchey), is dying. He expects he'll be dead by morning. Jason also hates his daughter and her family. He sees Emily (Virginia Gregg) as spineless, her husband Wilfred (Milton Seltzer) as greedy, her son Wilfred, Jr. (Alan Sues) as dumb and oafish, and her daughter Paula (Brooke Hayward) as vain and shallow.

At dinner, the family members all feign politeness, but the audience trusts Jason when he says they are all terrible people who are only interested in inheriting his fortune. After dinner, Jason calls the quartet into the drawing room for a Mardi Gras game. The patriarch has commissioned five expressive, full-face masks that he and his family are to wear.

Warning: The Thing spoilers jump out of nowhere in this piece!

“The last place you want to be in a storm in Antarctica is locked up with a bunch of Norwegian guys,” Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a Columbia graduate and vertebrate paleontologist, is warned as she is flown into the tundra surrounding “Thule,” the central research station in The Thing (2011). The sequestered Norse researchers have never seen John Carpenter’s claustrophobic 1982 alien invasion classic, The Thing. After all, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and writer Eric Heisserer’s 2011 prequel is set at the Antarctic facility from which the very Thing from outer space splits at the beginning of the ‘82 film. So the newest movie, which is finding a quasi-renaissance on Netflix these days, is a translation of the prior events by Heijningen and Heisserer.

In the snowbound original film, when exploring a deserted outpost in the aftermath of an as-yet-unknown extraterrestrial disaster,...

Forget the box office top ten estimated weekend charts published yesterday. They all left out one film: John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic “The Thing.” The film, which played in around 730 theaters for a single showtime on Sunday only as a Fathom Events presentation, ended up in the #9 position for the three days with about 500,000 total, per industry sources.

Appearances by vintage titles on the top ten was common when theaters reopened after Covid-issued lockdowns and into early 2021, but that an older re-release — much less one with a single showing — could find a place among the biggest grossing films of a June 2022 weekend is a circumstance related to the dearth of films in theatrical release. Though the combined result of the weekend’s top titles — “Jurassic World: Dominion” (Universal), “Lightyear” (Disney), and “Top Gun: Maverick” (Paramount) — ended up with very healthy grosses, there was a steep drop among other 2022 releases. That...

Tim Donnelly, the actor best known for his portrayal of fun-loving firefighter Chet Kelly on NBC’s ’70s series Emergency!, has died. He was 77.

A cause of death was not disclosed, though the Los Angeles County Fire Museum confirmed the news via a tribute posted to their official Facebook page.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce the sudden passing of our friend, Tim Donnelly, this weekend. To all the Emergency! fans, we want you to know that he was very excited about coming to the Museum in January for the 50th Anniversary,” a spokesperson wrote. “Many of the Museum Board Members have great memories of Tim from our time on Project 51 and personal contact. To his daughter, grandchildren, and siblings, we offer our sincerest condolences.”

Donnelly was born on September 3, 1944, finding his first role in Don Siegel’s 1957 crime drama, Baby Face Nelson, and going on to enjoy a 27-year screen career.

This big, expensive and well-produced action-suspense Sci-fi epic mostly delivers on its promise to be Aliens at the bottom of the sea. At heart it’s a 1950s pulse-pounder with a bigger monster, a zillion times the budget and a script that does everything but make us care. We appreciate the likable characters but it’s too easy to predict who will ‘get it’ next. The realism factor is not bad at all, although the undersea explorer video training sessions should have given ‘how not to crack up under stress’ more emphasis. And can’t anybody properly mind those pesky nuclear bombs?

DeepStar Six

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1989 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 99 min. / Street Date October 13, 2020 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Greg Evigan, Nancy Everhard, Miguel Ferrer, Nia Peeples, Cindy Pickett, Matt McCoy, Taurean Blacque, Marius Weyers, Elya Baskin, Thom Bray, Ronn Carroll.

Cinematography: Mac Ahlberg

Film Editor: David Handman

Original...

Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none

“Docu-noir At Its Finest”

By Raymond Benson

A sub-genre of film noir is that of the so-called “docu-noir,” a crime drama usually based on a true story and told as a Dragnet-style procedural. Most likely there is an omniscient voiceover narrator, a focus on the lawmen who are investigating the case, and all the other stylistic and thematic elements associated with film noir in general: starkly contrasting black and white photography, urban locations, shadows, gritty realism, angst and cynicism, and sometimes brutal violence.

Eagle-Lion Films was a British/American production company that existed for only a few years in the late 40s, disbanding in the early 50s. There was some talent involved, and they produced a variety of genres and pictures of varying quality (Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes was a rare Best Picture nominee). Many of the studio’s pictures...

Exciting news for fans of classic sci-fi! Kenneth Tobey and James Arness in The Thing From Another World (1951) is available on Blu-ray from Warner Archives. Ordering information can be found Here

Howard Hawks’ production of The Thing From Another World, adapted from the classic story “Who Goes There?” by Science Fiction Grandmaster John W. Campbell, is a pitch perfect example of genre filmmaking at its finest and, much like his entire oeuvre – from screwball comedy to melodrama to hardboiled detective to western – a treasure that makes movie magic. Under Christian Nyby’s lean direction, Charles Lederer’s rapid-fire dialogue and a cast of fine journeymen performers, this tale of scientists and servicemen confronting the unknown above the Arctic Circle shines with crisp atomic-age radiation in this scintillating HD presentation in all its glorious Black and White wonder.

Arctic researchers discover a huge, frozen spaceling inside a crash-landed UFO, then fight...

Intrepid soldiers and scientists battle a bloodsucking alien invader at the top of the world! The Warner Archive Collection releases Howard Hawks’ incomparable Science Fiction thriller, a long-desired favorite. Long handicapped by missing scenes, this Rko classic is intact again, complete with its nerve-rattling bombastic Dimitri Tiomkin music score.

The Thing from Another World

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1951 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 87 min. / Street Date December 18, 2018 / 21.99

Starring: Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer, James R. Young, Dewey Martin, Robert Nichols, William Self, Eduard Franz, James Arness, Paul Frees, George Fenneman, John Dierkes.

Cinematography: Russell Harlan

Art Direction: Albert S. D’Agostino, John J. Hughes

Film Editor: Roland Gross

Original Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Written by Charles Lederer from a short story by John W. Campbell Jr.

Produced by Howard Hawks

Directed by Christian Nyby

Still one of the all-time favorites of 1950s science fiction filmmaking, Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World...

The Night I SwamThe Vienna International Film Festival—or the Viennale, for short—has for many years been a kind of respite, perhaps even a bit of a beautiful secret outside of European cinephilia, for those looking to be invigorated by the ever-renewing promise of cinema. First under the direction of Alexander Horwath, who left the festival in 1997 and in 2002 took the lead of the illustrious Austrian Film Museum, and for the last 21 years under the guidance of Hans Hurch, the Viennale has cultivated that rare thing: A cultural institution that has a distinct and idiosyncratic sensibility of taste. It is a yearly event in which you can find the rare gems of the mainstream vividly mixed with expansive retrospectives, the latest films from major auteurs and exciting debutantes alike, with no fear of short or medium length works, a strong love for the avant-garde and an even more fierce...

It was actually pretty surprising to hear John Carpenter bash not only Rob Zombie's 2007 Halloween remake but also the rocker-turned-director himself in a recently-resurfaced Q&A held at the New York Film Academy, mainly because the director of such genre classics as The Fog, Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China hasn't historically been keen on weighing in on remakes of his films. In fact, he has self-admittedly been a "shut up and take the money" kind of guy in that regard, with the following exchange from a 2007 Moviemaker interview being pretty typical of his general attitude: Mm: If you could pick which of your films was going to be remade, which one would you choose? Jc: The one where they pay me the most money. Despite Carpenter's relative restraint on the issue of John Carpenter Remakes (it's worth mentioning that the director has received...

Nearly 35 years after its release, John Carpenter’s The Thing remains one of the greatest—if not the greatest—horror movies of all-time. A masterpiece of dread, tension, nihilism, and staggeringly imaginative practical effects, it is a high-water mark of the genre and the best movie ever made by a filmmaker with a lot of great movies to his credit. This is John Carpenter’s masterpiece.

By now, you know the story. For this loose remake of Christian Nyby’s (and Howard Hawks’) 1951 sci-fi classic, The Thing from Another World, Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster went back to John Campbell Jr.’s original story “Who Goes There?” to tell the tale of a research team in the Antarctic who encounter an alien life form with the ability to assimilate and imitate any being it encounters. Totally isolated by the freezing temperatures and snowy landscape, the men can no longer be...

Bogart finds Bacall and movie history is made; for once the make-believe romantic chemistry is abundantly real. Howard Hawks' wartime Caribbean adventure plays in grand style, with his patented mix of precision and casual cool. It's one of the most entertaining pictures of the 'forties. To Have and Have Not Blu-ray Warner Archive Collection 1944 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 100 min. / Street Date July 19, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan, Hoagy Carmichael,Dolores Moran, Sheldon Leonard, Walter Szurovy, Marcel Dalio, Walter Sande, Dan Seymour. Cinematography Sid Hickox Art Direction Charles Novi Film Editor Christian Nyby Original Music Hoagy Carmichael, William Lava, Franz Waxman Written by Jules Furthman, William Faulkner from the novel by Ernest Hemingway Produced by Howard Hawks, Jack L. Warner Directed by Howard Hawks

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Speaking for myself, I can't think of a more 'Hawksian' picture than To Have and Have Not.

By Todd Garbarini

The Ahrya Fine Arts Theater in Los Angeles will be presenting a fun-filled weekend of six science fiction classics from Friday, April 15th to Sunday, April 17th. Several cast members from the films are scheduled to appear in person at respective screenings, so read on for more information:

From the press release:

Anniversary Classics Sci-Fi Weekend

Part of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: www.laemmle.com/ac.

Re-visit the Golden Age of the Science Fiction Film as Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series presents Sci-fi Weekend, a festival of six classic films April 15-17 at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills.

It was dawn of the Atomic Age and the Cold War, as Communist and nuclear war paranoia swept onto the nation’s movie screens to both terrify and entertain the American public. All the favorite icons are here: Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet,...

We've waited long enough: Bogart's take on Raymond Chandler's tough guy Philip Marlowe is finally on Blu-ray, with Lauren Bacall hyped as his provocative leading lady. The fascinating 1945 pre-release version is also present, with an uncut copy of Bob Gitt's versions comparison docu. Somebody tell Elisha Cook Jr. not to drink that stuff. The Big Sleep Blu-ray Warner Archive Collection 1946 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 114 min. / Street Date February 23, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone, Peggy Knudsen, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Bob Steele, Elisha Cook Jr., Louis Jean Heydt, Sonja Darrin, Tommy Rafferty, Theodore von Eltz. Cinematography Sidney Hickox Film Editor Christian Nyby Original Music Max Steiner Written by Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, William Faulkner from the novel by Raymond Chandler Directed by Howard Hawks

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep became...

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A killer robot powered by baby brains. Kirk Douglas wrestling in the nude. Ryan revisits the very weird 80s sci-fi movie, Saturn 3...

Some movies aspire to strangeness. Other movies have strangeness thrust upon them.

Saturn 3, released in 1980, was an intensely strange film. But unlike, say, Altered States (also released in 1980) it wasn’t made by a filmmaker with a taste for the oblique or the outre. Unlike Luigi Cozzi’s Contamination (1980 again), Saturn 3 wasn’t a low-budget shocker made in a hurry, but a relatively expensive exercise created by some of the most seasoned filmmakers in the business at that time. (For frame of reference, Saturn 3's budget was broadly the same as Alien’s, released less than one year earlier.)

On the surface, Saturn 3 sounds like a perfectly reasonable recipe for an intense sci-fi horror flick. It’s about a pair...

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Universal's classic monster movie Creature From The Black Lagoon was almost remade by John Carpenter in the 1990s. So what happened?

It's one of the great suspense scenes in 50s genre cinema: a woman swims in the clear cool water of an Amazonian lagoon, blissfully unaware of the grotesque creature emerging from the depths beneath her. The score builds to a crescendo as the monster closes in, reaching out with a clawed, webbed hand...

Director Jack Arnold directed some of the best American sci-fi movies of the post-wwii era, and Creature From The Black Lagoon is perhaps his most famous. About a team of scientists investigating the fossilised remains of a strange man-fish hybrid - and discovering the thing still very much alive in the depths of the Amazon - the movie was a sizeable hit for Universal when it came out in early 1954.

The cultural impact...

Continuing our series on Hollywood remakes, this week’s film is one of those lauded remakes that many say is better than the original. While a horror movie may not be in the Christmas spirit, this film does have a lot of snow in it. This week, Cinelinx looks at John Carpenter’s The Thing.

When people talk about remakes of old films, the one that is most often mentioned as being better than the original is John Carpenter’s 1982 horror flick, The Thing, which is a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks classic The Thing From Another World. There’s a good argument to be made for the newer one. Not that the first one isn’t an excellent movie, but this is a rare occasion where the reputation of the remake seems to overshadow the original.

Both films were based on the short story “Who Goes There?” by John W.

Arrow Films

Never mind the arguments about money and having kids – the single most divisive issue in a relationship is what films to watch on Netflix. If she can make you sit through Girl Interrupted (“you’ll like it – it’s about a bunch of hot chicks, and they’re all mental!”), then the least she can do is sit still during The Thing From Another World.

Christian Nyby’s 1951 movie hasn’t aged well, and it had its thunder stolen by John Carpenter’s awesome 1982 remake, but it has never looked more dated than when viewed with a petulant girlfriend, who sniggers every time the man-in-a-suit monster puts in an appearance. Worst of all is the scene where the scientists deduce that the creature is an “intelligent carrot”, which prompts the quip, “What do they do, boil it to death?”

That remark brought to mind something Alfred Hitchcock said...

We may remember Independence Day, The Matrix, The Phantom Menace. But what about these forgotten 90s sci-fi films? And are any worth seeing?

Think back to the science fiction cinema of the 1990s, and some of the decade's biggest box-office hits will immediately spring to mind: The Phantom Menace, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Men In Black, Armageddon and Terminator 2 were all in the top 20 most lucrative films of the era.

But what about the sci-fi films of the 1990s that failed to make even close to the same cultural and financial impact of those big hitters? These are the films this list is devoted to - the flops, the straight-to-video releases, the low-budget and critically-derided. We've picked 50 live-action films that fit these criteria, and dug them up to see whether they're still worth watching in the 21st century.

So here's a mix of everything from hidden classics to forgettable dreck,...

From Psycho to Jurassic Park, here are 23 teaser trailers that don't show a frame of footage from the movies they're advertising...

These days, we're used to the marketing hype for a major film building up about two years ahead of release. Visitors to Comic-Con got a preview of Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, for example, more than two years ahead of its due date. Our collective hunger for a first look at major forthcoming films is such that, it seems, studios are keen to show off their work-in-progress earlier and earlier.

But there are ways of teasing a forthcoming movie without showing a frame of the finished product, which is where the following list comes in. They're all examples of promos that manage to get across the flavour of a future film without going into story details. Some of them were made before a foot of celluloid was exposed,...

Take a little afternoon flashback to 1982, when John Carpenter’s “The Thing” began scaring moviegoers all across the country. The genre classic is based on John W. Campbell, Jr.’s novella, “Who Goes There?” and improves (greatly) upon Howard Hawks’ and Christian Nyby’s 1951 adaptation of the story, “The Thing from Another World.” In “The Thing,” a group of researchers in Antarctica unearth a frozen, shape-shifting monster, which hunts the researchers in their utilitarian lab. Though the film wasn’t able to break $20M at the box office, it has gone on to scare viewers for over 30 years. As necessary, given the external shots the movie required, the cast and crew went on location for large chunks of the production. As expected, they didn’t actually fly down to the Antarctic to do it. Rather, as this vintage 12-minute featurette explains, they shot in British Columbia, near the Alaskan border.

Humankind’s collision with otherworldly life forms can make for unforgettable cinema.

This article will highlight the best of live-action human vs. alien films. The creatures may be from other planets or may be non-demonic entities from other dimensions.

Excluded from consideration were giant monster films as the diakaiju genre would make a great subject for separate articles.

Readers looking for “friendly alien” films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953) and the comically overrated Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) are advised to keep watching the skies because they won’t find them here.

Film writing being the game of knowledge filtered through personal taste that it is, some readers’ subgenre favorites might not have made the list such as War of the Worlds (1953) and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).

Now let’s take a chronological look at the cinema’s best battles between Us and Them.

We take a light-hearted look at a few of the more strange coincidences and quirks of fate in recent cinema history...

Top 10

Stories are often built on coincidences and happenstance. Chance encounters at railway stations. Bruce Willis bumping into Ving Rhames while he's out and about in his Honda in Pulp Fiction. But what about those weird patterns we see in our everyday reality, or, more to the point, in cinema history?

When Batman Begins came out, it was widely noted that Christian Bale had already played an unfathomably rich man with a secret double life before, in Mary Harron's adaptation of American Psycho. Bale's character, Patrick Bateman, even has a surname that's basically Batman with an 'e' added to it.

Those are the kinds of strange quirks of fate we're looking at here. If you have any of your own, do share them in the comments section.

10. Instruments...

Red River

Written by Borden Chase and Charles Schnee

Directed by Howard Hawks

USA, 1948

Howard Hawks’ Red River is supposedly the film that convinced John Ford of John Wayne’s talent (apparently opposed to his abilities to simply perform or suggest a powerful screen presence). Ford had, of course, worked with Wayne previously, and Wayne had appeared in dozens of other films prior to this point, but when Ford saw what Wayne did in the role of the aged, bitter, driven, and obsessive Thomas Dunson, it led him to comment to his friend Hawks, “I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act.” If it were only for Wayne’s performance, which is excellent, Red River would be a vital entry into the Western genre. But there is more, much more to this extraordinary picture. That’s why it’s not only one of the greatest Westerns ever made,...

The Criterion Collection continues to impress through the remarkable range of what it offers cineastes on a monthly basis. Look at the highlights of their May 2014 Blu-ray offerings, all currently available in stores and for online order. What on Earth do “Overlord,” “Like Someone in Love,” and “Red River” have in common?

One is set in World War II, one during the Chisholm Trail, and one in present day. One is British, one defiantly American, and one is Japanese. Abbas Kiarostami really couldn’t have more distinctly different cinematic intentions than Howard Hawks. And yet Criterion wisely understands that film lovers love all different kinds of film. Pick your favorite.

For me, the best film is “Like Someone in Love,” the best release is “Red River.” “Overlord” remains an interesting curiosity, a film that blends archival footage and fictional filmmaking to achieve something unique. Directed by Stuart Cooper and shot...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: May 27, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

John Wayne and Mongomery Clift head to Missouri in Red River.

No matter what genre he worked in, Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday) played by his own rules, and never was this more evident than in his first western, the rowdy and whip-smart 1948 film Red River.

In this American cinema classic, John Wayne (True Grit) found one of his greatest roles as an embittered, tyrannical Texas rancher whose tensions with his independent-minded adopted son, played by Montgomery Clift (From Here to Eternity) in a breakout performance, reach epic proportions during a cattle drive to Missouri, which is based on a real-life late nineteenth-century expedition.

Yet Hawks is less interested in historical accuracy than in tweaking the codes of masculinity that propel the myths of the American West. The unerringly macho Wayne and the neurotic, boyish Clift make for an improbably perfect pair,...

Ryan Lambie Jun 26, 2017

35 years ago, The Thing was panned by critics. We take a look at the angry reaction and its modern status as a horror classic...

It's the summer of 1982, and director John Carpenter is on the cusp of releasing his latest movie, The Thing. For the 34-year-old filmmaker, the release marks the end of a major undertaking: the culmination of months of shooting on freezing cold sets and snowy British Columbia locations, not to mention the execution of complex and time-consuming practical effects scenes.

See related Twin Peaks season 3 episode 7 review: There’s A Body All Right Twin Peaks season 3 episode 6 review: Don’t Die Twin Peaks season 3 episode 5 review: Case Files

Carpenter was understandably proud of the results: after such independent hits as Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween and Escape From New York, this was his first studio movie (for Universal) and also his most expensive to date,...

Feature Ryan Lambie 20 Jan 2014 - 06:27

John Carpenter's The Thing was panned by reviewers in 1982. We take a look at the angry critical reaction and the later reassessment...

It's the summer of 1982, and director John Carpenter is on the cusp of releasing his latest movie, The Thing. For the 34-year-old filmmaker, the release marks the end of a major undertaking: the culmination of months of shooting on freezing cold sets and snowy British Columbia locations, not to mention the execution of complex and time-consuming practical effects scenes.

Carpenter was understandably proud of the results: after the independent such independent hits as Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween and Escape From New York, this was his first studio movie (for Universal) and also his most expensive to date, with a budget of around $15m. And while The Thing had appeared in cinemas before (in the guise of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's 1951 sci-fi shocker,...

Air Force screens on October 19 at the Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective, The Complete Howard Hawks. For more of Dan Sallitt's writing on Hawks, go here and here.

Air Force occupies an unusual place in Howard Hawks' filmography. As a war propaganda film, its subject matter is necessarily tendentious, with an overt message that is not only coercive but also repetitive. Hawks, whose control over his choice of material was quite unusual by Hollywood standards of the time, shows no sign of resisting the project's wartime agenda, and willingly accepts the character stereotyping and up-front ideology that comes with the package: the eager young recruits, the cynic to be converted, the proud parent set up for loss. In addition, Hawks' streak of dark humor combines with the project's built-in tone of righteous vengeance against the Japanese in a way that can strike peacetime audiences as callous.

On the other hand,...

You can’t beat a great movie villain, and as so many terrible movies have learned, you can’t really have a great film without one – they should challenge the hero and, when the good guy vanquishes them at the end of the movie, it will prove their worth.

In these 9 instances, we were left with 9 horrendous movie villains who, in future installments, remakes and reboots, were successfully re-imagined in far more terrifying and effective forms.

Whether suffering by straying from the source material or simply having been beleaguered by dated effects, these 9 villains were brought surging back to life in their later iteration, bolstered by state-of-the-art visuals and a greater reverence for the source material.

Without these 9 movies daring to take these limp villains and elevate them to the next level, they would still be a cinematic laughing stock. Here are 9 retarded movie villains who were successfully re-imagined…

9. The Thing...

Mick Garris' House of Horrors kicks off this week at Trailers from Hell, with director Garris introducing Tobe Hooper's 1982 film, "Poltergeist.""They're he-eere!"  Hooper's fifth feature was his biggest to date, produced on a grand scale by co-writer Steven Spielberg the same year he made Et. Its critical and boxoffice success was undercut by persistent rumors that Spielberg had co-opted the film much like Howard Hawks did with Christian Nyby (on The Thing) and shadow-directed, a claim both filmmakers denied. The untimely deaths of several people connected with the production gave rise in some quarters to the claim the franchise was somehow "cursed". Followed by Poltergest II: The Other Side and Poltergeist III, neither of which involved Spielberg or Hooper.

Above: 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1932).

When I wrote about the posters of 1933 last week this was one poster I deliberately held back (though 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was released on Christmas Eve 1932, it is included in Film Forum’s retrospective). The early 1930s, no less than today—though the execution was a lot more interesting— was an era of big floating heads in movie posters. While 1920s movies had the occasional floating head poster for their biggest stars, artists and studios still favored the look of early silent posters with their head-to-toe portraits and snippets of narrative. Though Norma Desmond said famously of the silent era “We didn’t need dialogue...we had faces!” it was ironically with the coming of sound that faces started to dominate movie posters and, until Saul Bass, minimalism in American movie posters was almost non-existent.

All that makes the 20,000 Years poster,...