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Adapted from Larry McMurtry’s bittersweet 1966 novel of the same name by McMurtry and director Peter Bogdanovich, The Last Picture Show delineates the quiet, desperate lives of the citizens of Anarene, Texas, from November 1951 to October 1952. The film is a pure Janus-headed product of the New Hollywood. Bogdanovich pours the new wine of sexual frankness available to filmmakers after the inauguration of the MPAA ratings system into old bottles borrowed from the cellars of classic Hollywood cinema, namely those older films’ expressive visual grammar and obliquely suggestive dialogue.

As an erstwhile film critic and historian, Bogdanovich drew formal and technical inspiration from his years spent programming films from Hollywood’s Golden Age at MoMA. He also solicited advice from houseguest Orson Welles when it came to shooting the film in black and white, and employing long, unbroken takes rather than break up important scenes. As Welles reportedly put it:...

Despite being the most well-known cryptid, Bigfoot has surprisingly few horror movies dedicated to it – and even fewer that are worth seeking out. After the infamous Patterson–Gimlin film purportedly captured footage of the creature in 1967, a spate of Bigfoot movies surfaced in the ’70s.

Although not the first, 1972’s The Legend of Boggy Creek is generally considered the best and most influential of the era. I was of that mindset before discovering 1976’s Creature from Black Lake via Synapse Films’ upcoming Blu-ray. While it’s certainly indebted to Boggy Creek for paving the way, Black Lake eschews the docudrama setup in favor of a traditional film narrative.

Shot on location in the Shreveport, LA area, the film follows University of Chicago students Pahoo and Rives on a school-funded expedition down south in an effort to prove the existence of the legendary bipedal primate.

They encounter several colorful locals, including...

by Christ Wright, MoreHorror.com

Mountaintop Motel Massacre is a classic example of a slasher movie that had so much potential yet it was entirely wasted! I sort of knew what to expect when I heard mundane things about this movie but I didn’t expect it to be this riddled with plot holes. New World Pictures released this movie in 1986. My mind was massacred while watching this tedious movie.

The plot begins with an insane asylum patient released back into the world and she returns back to the motel she once lived. All is not well when she “accidentally” kills her girl Lori (Jill King) in a fit of rage. I guess crazed mental patient Evelyn (Anna Chappell) was released too soon it seems? The police let Evelyn off (for reasons that make no sense) citing it was an accident. The kills to come are no accident on her part.

This July and August, the UCLA Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles, California is screening a series of horror and thriller films directed by women called No She Didn't!: Women Exploitation Auteurs. From July 24th through August 8th, films like Terminal Island (directed by Stephanie Rothman), Bad Girls Go To Hell and Another Day, Another Man (directed by Doris Wishman), Gaitor Bait (directed by Beverly Sebastian), Bury Me an Angel (directed by Barbra Peters), and Slumber Party Massacre (directed by Amy Holden-Jones) will be screened in their full exploitation glory.

July 24th, Stephanie Rothman will make a rare appearance to introduce Terminal Island, her feminist exploitation flick...

In the 1970s and ‘80s, something funny happened on the way to the grindhouse. With women still sorely under-represented in the directorial ranks of the "New Hollywood," a number of women began working as writer-directors in the low-budget world of exploitation films.