News

The EuroCrypt of Christopher Lee

Blu ray – Region Free

Severin Films

1962-72

Starring Christopher Lee, Thorley Walters, Karin Dor

Cinematography by Ernst W. Kalinke, Angelo Baistrocchi

Directed by Terence Fisher, Harald Reinl

While Hammer Studios depended on bosoms and blood to rejuvenate a listless horror industry, their new contract player had some high octane ideas of his own. His name was Christopher Lee and though the hulking actor towered above the crew and co-stars, he proved shockingly agile as the newborn creature in 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein. No matter how hospitable or well-tailored, his Dracula was a clear and present danger—fleet of foot and supernaturally strong. And in 1959’s The Mummy, he turned the slow-moving immortal into an Olympian killing machine, outpacing his victims like an undead Usain Bolt.

Making the scene just as the sixties were racing into view, Lee’s express lane monsters ignored musty gothic...

By Lee Pfeiffer

German actress Karin Dor has died at age 79. She had been in a nursing home since suffering the severe aftereffects of a fall last year. Dor was a popular presence in European cinema. She began acting in the 1950s and became a well-known star in the 1960s. She frequently collaborated with her husband, Austrian director Harald Reinl. She appeared in several of the popular German "Winnetou"  westerns and well as German crime programs on television. In 1967 she achieved a new level of fame when she was cast as Helga Brandt, the sultry Spectre agent who seduces Sean Connery's James Bond before attempting to kill him in the 1967 blockbuster "You Only Live Twice". Dor's character suffered a memorable fate when her employer, Spectre chieftain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) ensures she drops into his piranha-filled moat. She later had a leading role in Alfred Hitchcock's 1969 spy...

Karin Dor, who played the red-haired villainess Helga Brandt in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, died Monday in a nursing home in Munich, her son told the Bild newspaper. She was 79.

The German beauty also had a key role as a revolutionary in the Alfred Hitchcock Cuban missile crisis thriller Topaz (1969) and appeared opposite Christopher Lee in The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962), one of more than a dozen films she made with her then-husband, Austrian director Harald Reinl.

In her most famous role, Dor worked for the evil Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) as...

Out of all of Poe’s works, few have had as big of an impact on me as “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Like many youngsters with an interest in the macabre, it was the first to immediately grab my attention, its title conjuring images of a massive, swinging blade cutting a poor sap wide open. Of course, there’s more to the poem than that—it’s focused less on the titular blade and more on the paranoia it creates, as well as painting a portrait of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. It also has, quite infamously, one of the most frustrating deus ex machinas of all time, where the French army stops the swinging pendulum mere seconds before it can bisect our bound protagonist, much to the disappointment of English students the world over. While it’s hardly Poe’s best work, it’s certainly among his most iconic,...

Rumble Fish

Blu-ray

Criterion

1940 / B&W / 1:85 / Street Date April 25, 2017

Starring: Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Diane Lane.

Cinematography: Stephen Burum

Film Editor: Barry Malkin

Written by S.E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola

Produced by Francis Ford Coppola

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Rumble Fish, Francis Ford Coppola’s Young Adult tone poem, unspools in a black and white never-never land of sullen teens, pool tables and pompadours. It may take a moment for the audience to suss out that we’re not in the Eisenhower era with Chuck Berry, Marilyn Monroe and the Cold War but squarely in Reagan’s domain of MTV, Madonna and the Cold War.

Set in a destitute Oklahoma town with the ghost of The Last Picture Show whistling through its empty streets, Matt Dillon plays Rusty, an inveterate gang-banger growing up in the shadow of his older brother played by Mickey Rourke, a reformed juvenile...

Chamber of Horrors

Blu-ray

Kino Lorber

1940 / B&W / 1:33 / Street Date March 21, 2017

Starring: Lilli Palmer, Leslie Banks.

Cinematography: Alex Bryce, Ernest Palmer

Film Editor: Ted Richards

Written by Gilbert Gunn, Norman Lee

Produced by John Argyle

Directed by Norman Lee

Near the turn of the century a struggling war correspondent named Edgar Wallace began churning out detective stories for British monthlies like Detective Story Magazine to help make the rent. Creative to a fault, his preposterously prolific output (exacerbated by ongoing gambling debts) soon earned him a legion of fans along with a pointedly ambiguous sobriquet, “The Man Who Wrote Too Much.”

A reader new to Wallace’s work could be excused for thinking the busy writer was making it up as he went along… because that’s pretty much what he did. He dictated his narratives, unedited, into a dictaphone for transcription by his secretary where they would then...

Continued from this article

Part I. Denazifying Leni

After World War II, Leni Riefenstahl couldn’t escape the Fuhrer’s shadow. Arrested first by American, then French troops, her property and money seized, she endured interrogations about her ties to the regime. Riefenstahl argued she’d been coerced into making propaganda and wasn’t aware of Nazi atrocities. The image stuck: three denazification tribunals acquitted her (one cautiously branding her a “fellow traveler”), and Riefenstahl began the road to rehabilitation.

More diligent investigators challenged her self-portrait. In 1946, American journalist Budd Schulberg interviewed Riefenstahl for the Saturday Evening Post. Riefenstahl claimed she didn’t know about Nazi concentration camps. Later, asked why she made Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl claimed Joseph Goebbels threatened her with a concentration camp. Disgusted with Riefenstahl’s self-serving contradictions, Schulberg labeled her a “Nazi Pin-Up Girl.”

Then the German tabloid Revue published a damning article in...

Part I. A Filmmaker’s Apotheosis

April 20th, 1938 marked Adolf Hitler’s 49th birthday. In the past five years, he’d rebuilt Germany from destitute anarchy into a burgeoning war machine, repudiated the Versailles Treaty and, that March, incorporated Austria into his Thousand-Year Reich. In Nazi Germany, fantasy co-mingled with ideology, expressing an obsession with Germany’s mythical past through propaganda and art. Fittingly, Hitler celebrated at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, Germany’s most prestigious cinema.

There, Nazi officials and foreign diplomats joined dignitaries of German kultur. Present were Wilhelm Furtwangler, conductor of Berlin’s Philharmonic Orchestra; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and confidante; actor Gustaf Grundgens, transformed from Brechtian Bolshevik to director of Prussia’s State Theater; and movie star Emil Jannings, Oscar-winner of The Lost Command and The Blue Angel, now an Artist of the State. Also Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who nationalized German cinema in...

Ancient aliens visiting earth, guiding early man. In the 70's, with the popularity of Erich von Däniken's book and Harald Reinl's film Chariot of the Gods, they were a hot topic. The Nazca Lines, Pyramids of Giza, and other wonders suggest the use of technology unavailable to people of the period.

This, and the scattered ancient artwork on several continents that suggests flying machines and men in spacesuits, drove a paranormal fad into a pop culture phenomenon.

While much of the evidence related to the ancient astronaut theory has been refuted, it's difficult to debunk much of the artistic evidence left behind by ancient men, and the latest discovery of this kind of graphic evidence is in India.

The Times of India is reporting the discovery of ancient cave paintings in the relatively remote state of Chhattisgarh. These paintings depict humanoids who appear to be wearing suits with...