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Writer/director Robert Eggers just dominated at the box office with Nosferatu, earning over $136 million at the worldwide box office thus far. The movie's eerie Gothic wintry setting was perfect for the holiday season, and it showed a trend towards electrifying new life into old, black-and-white Universal monster movies. Eggers is in good company since director Leigh Whannell, who already had a hit with his remake of The Invisible Man in 2020, is set to explore another Universal monster with Wolf Man.

While these movies have been undeniably successful, there are still many Universal monster movies that have gone unexplored. Time has seemed to have forgotten all about these classic Universal monsters. Almost everyone is familiar with Dracula, Frankenstein, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Creature From the Black Lagoon, but few know these underrated horror icons exist. It's time they got the respect and maybe even the reboot that they deserve.

While many of us may still be feeling the icy chill of winter, Scream Factory already has their sights set on a scare-filled spring, as they've announced new 4K Uhd releases for Skyline, Brotherhood of the Wolf, and The Haunting (1999) this May, as well as a Blu-ray double feature for Conquest of Space and I Married a Monster from Outer Space:

From Scream Factory: When sunrise arrives two hours early in the form of a haunting light from an unknown source, a group of friends watch in terror as people across the city are drawn outside and swept into massive alien ships that have blotted out the L.A. skyline. Now, it will take every survival instinct the group has to elude capture in Skyline, starring Eric Balfour (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Donald Faison (Scrubs) and Scottie Thompson (Star Trek).

Pre-order: https://shoutfactory.com/products/skyline?utm_source=facebook...

Top notch action director William Witney brings together Audie Murphy and a vivid supporting cast of B-movie stars including Buster Crabbe and Gloria Talbott. Murphy plays a former Quantrill’s Raider seeking redemption in his search for the kidnapped daughter of a Yaqui Indian chief. Thanks to an empathetic script, Native Americans are treated with all due respect.

And here are three interviews with Mr. Witney:

Serial Days at Republic, “2 Directors No Waiting”

Working With Trigger

Serial Days at Republic- Working with Herbert J Yates

The post Arizona Raiders appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Why do we like horror and monster movies that routinely get labeled as ‘bad?’ Because many of them have great story ideas and look at the world from odd, warped viewpoints. Back when ‘warped’ wasn’t a prerequisite for All filmed entertainment (my exaggeration) this murderous rejuvenation tale could be appreciated as something unusual, even quirky. Jeez, the characters are even nastier than the people I know! Lovely Coleen Gray takes a chance on a downmarket Universal programmer and proves how well she can carry a movie, even through several dubious horror make-ups.

The Leech Woman

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1960 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 77 min. / Street Date August 27, 2019 / Available from Scream Factory

Starring: Coleen Gray, Grant Williams, Phillip Terry, Gloria Talbott, John Van Dreelen, Estelle Hemsley, Kim Hamilton, Arthur Batanides, Murray Alper, Paul Thompson.

Cinematography: Ellis W. Carter

Film Editor: Milton Carruth

Original Music: Irving Gertz

Written by David Duncan, story by Ben Pivar,...

To get everyone in the mood for his ninth film, director and cult film guru Quentin Tarantino has something special in mind for the Sony Movie Channel. From the 5th of August Tarantino’s ‘Swinging Sixties-a-Movie Marathon’ will showcase nine films which perfectly set the tone for Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood, which comes out in cinemas on the 14th of August.

Each of these films has been specially curated, having influenced the director’s new film, and will play individually or as double features. As always with the director, there are some surprises here. In amongst ’60s classics Easy Rider and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice are secret agent specials, violent Westerns and a little bit of love in all its complicated forms. In short – it’s a masterclass in movie mood – just the thing to dive into before you take a trip back to the...

He’s back — looking meaner and uglier than ever! Bert I. Gordon’s early sci-fi effort shapes up as a surprisingly entertaining monster thriller with an elemental appeal. And lots of groaning and howling, too. Led by Lon Chaney Jr., the all-name cast keeps things lively. The pop-eyed monster is the ultimate bogeyman for the kiddies. Any movie that inspired as many nightmares as this one did, can’t be bad.

The Cyclops

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1957 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 66 min. / Street Date September 25, 2010 / available through the Warner Archive Collection / 19.95

Starring James Craig, Gloria Talbott, Lon Chaney Jr., Tom Drake, Duncan Parkin, Vincent Padula.

Cinematography Ira Morgan

Film Editor Carlo Lodato

Technical Effects Bert I. Gordon, Flora Gordon

Vocal Effects Paul Frees

Makeup Jack H. Young

Original Music Albert Glasser

Written, Produced and Directed by Bert I. Gordon

The pleasant surprises keep coming, and this time out the Wac...

Let’s take a trip back to Bronson Caverns, but with new and better photos! Once you visit this hiding-in-plain-sight Hollywood location, you’ll start seeing it every time you tune into an old movie.

CineSavant Article

The most frequent ‘unknown’ location in film history?

Part of what was cool about moving to Los Angeles in 1970 was realizing that, since the majority of Hollywood movies were filmed locally, just about every interesting sight in the city has been used as a movie location. You don’t have to be ga-ga about movie stars to see the ‘historicity’ in famous locations, or feel saddened when a special place is torn down. The art deco Pan-Pacific Auditorium was one such example. It featured prominently in the King Bros. movie Suspense (1946) and can be glimpsed briefly in the opening of Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1989), which was filmed just before it burned...

The European filmmaker directed a series of deceptively complex melodramas in the 1950s.“This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art” — Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk was born in Germany in 1900, and began his career in the early 1920s working in theater. In 1922, he directed his first production — an adaptation of Hermann Bossdorf’s Stationmaster Death, and from then on he became one of the most respected theater directors in Weimar Germany. Then, in 1934, he took a job as a film director at Ufa, the biggest studio in Germany at the time.

In 1941, Sirk left Germany and began working as a director in Hollywood. His early films, such as the WWII drama Hitler’s Madman (1942) have largely been forgotten. These early films varied in genre — he directed war films (Mystery Submarine), historical dramas (A Scandal in Paris), film...

We’Re No Angels (1955) plays on the big screen at St. Louis’ fabulous Hi-Pointe Theater this weekend as part of their Classic Film Series. It’s Saturday, December 3rd at 10:30am at the Hi-Pointe located at 1005 McCausland Ave., St. Louis, Mo 63117. Admission is only $5. Other Christmas films in December are It’S A Wonderful Life at 10:30am 12/10 and White Christmas at 10:30am 12/17 and Die Hard at midnight 12/23.

“We came here to rob them and that’s what we’re gonna do – beat their heads in, gouge their eyes out, slash their throats. Soon as we wash the dishes.”

Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray are the motley trio of convicts who escape from Devil’s Island prison just before Christmas in the festive 1955 comedy We’Re No Angels. They look for places to steal from and stumble across a store run by kindly but bumbling Felix...

All That Heaven Allows

Directed by Douglas Sirk

Written by Peg Fenwick

USA, 1955

If ever there was a movie to reap the visual benefits of a Criterion Collection Blu-ray digital restoration, it is Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film, All That Heaven Allows. This lushly photographed work is Sirk’s most scathing and insightful commentary on subversive Hollywood cinema and the sociocultural norms it sought to challenge. With venerable cinematographer Russell Metty behind the camera, the film is radiant with rich, pulsating color, giving visual vibrancy to lives of complacency and routine. It was Sirk’s follow-up to his successful Magnificent Obsession from the year before, which has similar themes and tones and was another gorgeous melodrama. Universal kept what worked, bringing back Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, and Metty. In many ways though, it’s All That Heaven Allows that stands as the defining work of Sirk’s career, the greatest of...

As Laura Mulvey’s essay, “An Articulate Screen” contends, 1955’s All That Heaven Allows was “just another critically unnoticed Hollywood genre product,” the attempt for a studio to repeat the pairing of stars Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman after the box office success of their work on the earlier Sirk title, Magnificent Obsession. But, the film has come to be one of Sirk’s signature pieces in an oeuvre astoundingly reconceived passionately by later generations of critics and international filmmakers, and rightly so. While his films can be classified as soapy melodramas, or that even more insidiously demeaning label, ‘women’s pictures,’ Sirk was hardly churning out tearjerker fodder—rather, his were insightful, complex portraits and elegant critiques of 1950’s social mores.

An upper class widow, Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) lives alone in her large home, her children Ned (William Reynolds) and Kay (Gloria Talbott) away at school and visiting on select holidays and weekends.

If the dissolve has traditionally been thought of as little more than a glue connecting scenes in a conventional dramaturgy, a functional symbol of time’s passage, the technique’s employment by Douglas Sirk always aimed at a more complex dimension. In Sirk’s films, the moment of the dissolve—often suspended for three or four seconds—becomes a composition in itself, a vital carrier of subtext. Less about division (1 happens, then 2 happens) than unity (1 affects or produces 2), Sirk’s dissolves—so tinged with import that they must have been the product of close collaborations with his editors and his regular cinematographer Russell Metty—reveal the psychological connective tissue that spreads across the course of a narrative. Temporal expanses have little relevance in this context; the dissolve becomes a way of demonstrating the coexistence of the past, present, and possible futures.

All That Heaven Allows (1955), simultaneously one of the leanest...

Randy’s split viticultural personality lies herein.

If you spend a lot of time at TrailersFromHell.com, you probably have an affinity for the low-budget horror films of the 1950s. Off-kilter story lines, scenery chewing, on-screen gaffes – not a problem! In fact, bring ‘em on! That’s what we came here for.

“Daughter of Dr. Jekyll” is right in your wheelhouse. It’s low-budget horror of the highest degree.

Gloria Talbott learns she is Dr. Jekyll’s daughter and, not surprisingly, her life takes a downward turn. Fearing a split personality which mirrors that of the good doctor/bad doctor, she thinks she’s a monster who “prowls the night, lusting for blood,” as the trailer indicates. She’s fairly distraught about all this. She’s not sleeping well. Mysterious stains appear on the nightgown, and it’s not spilled wine. People are beginning to ask questions about the gruesome...

Chicago – Diabolical twins, obsessed journalists and jail-breaking thugs are heading their way to the Music Box Theatre. The Film Noir Foundation’s third installment of “Noir City: Chicago” features no less than sixteen restored 35mm prints of must-see cinematic rarities. Ten of these noir classics have yet to land a DVD release, thus making this festival all the more essential for local cinephiles.

The week-long festival kicks off Friday, Aug. 12, and includes criminally overlooked performances from Hollywood legends such as Humphrey Bogart, Anne Bancroft, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia de Havilland, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Burt Lancaster. Acclaimed noir historians Alan K. Rode (“Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy”) and Foster Hirsch (“Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir”) will be presenting the pictures while offering their wealth of historical and filmic insight.

Among this year’s most priceless treasures is “Deadline USA,” starring Bogart as...

Are aliens out there? Do they really exist? Well, they are out there this weekend with the release of both Columbia Pictures Battle: Los Angeles and Walt Disney’s Pictures Mars Needs Moms, so we decided to talk about what makes a memorable, and all around cool alien. Where it be computers, puppets, or just a really neat paint job… these aliens bring their A-Game in the design department!

Top Ten Alien Designs Honorable Mention: The Bugs – Starship Troopers (1997)

Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) introduced a whole new generation to the glorious goodness of cheesy sci-fi fun, complete with his own blend of bloody over-the-top action and violence and corny dialogue. But, the best part of the movie were the “bugs” (or, aliens) with which the humans were deeply embroiled in intergalactic battle. The “bugs” were a nasty bunch, primitive and wild on the surface, but organized and efficient as...