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Easy Rider terrifies twenty confused studio executives because they don’t understand it. Hoping to keep their jobs, they rush to hire more longhairs to make movies ‘the kids’ will see. Ex- UCLA film student B.L. Norton parlayed his way into writing and directing on the streets of Los Angeles, with new stars Gene Hackman and Karen Black, and singer-songwriter of the year Kris Kristofferson in his first starring role as a musician forced to deal marijuana by a corrupt cop. A time travel trip back to the City of the Angels circa 1971, it’s realistic and honest, and Kristofferson turns out to have terrific camera presence.

Cisco Pike

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1972 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 95 min. / Street Date May 25, 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £ 15.99

Starring: Kris Kristofferson, Karen Black, Gene Hackman, Harry Dean Stanton, Viva, Joy Bang, Roscoe Lee Browne, Severn Darden, Antonio Fargas, Doug Sahm, Allan Arbus,...

Once again CineSavant becomes intrigued by a minor genre opus normally dismissed in a sentence or two; this Roger Corman production may fall short of his other early efforts because it tried to be too cerebral and then ran afoul of the Hollywood Guilds. David Kramarsky is listed as director but it’s hard to know how many of the credits are accurate — or simply bogus. Monstermaker extraordinaire Paul Blaisdell apparently came to the rescue with 11th-hour special effects to give the ambiguous, invisible alien menace more substance. Scorpion’s release has a new transfer and a commentary by Tim Lucas.

The Beast With a Million Eyes

Blu-ray

Scorpion Releasing

1955 / B&w / 1:37 full frame open aperture / 75 min. / Region A locked / Street Date November, 2019 /available through Ronin Flix (not Amazon) / 29.99

Starring: Paul Birch, Lorna Thayer, Dona Cole, Dick Sargent, Leonard Tarver, Bruce Whitmore, Chester Conklin.

Cinematography: Everett Baker + Floyd Crosby,...

'The Beast with a Million Eyes': Hardly truth in advertising as there's no million-eyed beast in Roger Corman's micro-budget sci-fi thriller. 'The Beast with a Million Eyes': Alien invasion movie predates Alfred Hitchcock classic Despite the confusing voice-over introduction, David Kramarsky's[1] The Beast with a Million Eyes a.k.a. The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes is one of my favorite 1950s alien invasion films. Set in an ugly, desolate landscape – shot “for wide screen in terror-scope” in Indio and California's Coachella Valley – the screenplay by future novelist Tom Filer (who also played Jack Nicholson's sidekick in the 1966 Western Ride in the Whirlwind) focuses on a dysfunctional family whose members become the first victims of a strange force from another galaxy after a spaceship lands nearby emitting sound vibrations that turn domestic animals into aggressive killers. Killer cow First, the lady-of-the-house is pecked by a flock of chickens and,...

Robert Mitchum ca. late 1940s. Robert Mitchum movies 'The Yakuza,' 'Ryan's Daughter' on TCM Today, Aug. 12, '15, Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” series is highlighting the career of Robert Mitchum. Two of the films being shown this evening are The Yakuza and Ryan's Daughter. The former is one of the disappointingly few TCM premieres this month. (See TCM's Robert Mitchum movie schedule further below.) Despite his film noir background, Robert Mitchum was a somewhat unusual choice to star in The Yakuza (1975), a crime thriller set in the Japanese underworld. Ryan's Daughter or no, Mitchum hadn't been a box office draw in quite some time; in the mid-'70s, one would have expected a Warner Bros. release directed by Sydney Pollack – who had recently handled the likes of Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, and Robert Redford – to star someone like Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman.