Several months ago, TVLand showed a bunch of "Daniel Boone" episodes because the series was coming out on DVD. I watched one episode from Season One and was struck by how little it matched up with what I remembered of the show. I guess I only started watching it around 1968 or so. Still, I...

"Inspector Morse" is a wonderful show. John Thaw is unforgettable as the intellectual detective. The "Inspector Lewis" episode they showed last summer was the highlight of last year's PBS "Mystery" season. I really only liked the first and the last "Prime Suspect.&...

I have seen some episodes of AHP and AHH and have read about the show a bit. It interests me that the show had seems to have had censorship problems. Apparently this is why Hitchcock had to come back on after the story ended, to "assure" people that the murderer was eventually caught. One ...

What about Paramount's noirs? I usually associate Paramount with comedy, but they did have Wilder's films (Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard) and the Ladd-Lake films. I suppose this is a more glamorous noir than other studios and thus not as grim.

I was very unimpressed with "Dawn of the Dead." The only Romero film I like is "Martin," and I may like it for the "wrong" reasons from Romero's point of view. (I really liked the character of Cuda, the old man who believes in vampires.) "Dawn of the Dead" was...

How did "Soldier" stack up with "The Terminator"? Ellison brought a successful lawsuit against "The Terminator" on the basis of "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand." I assume that the interrogation scenes in "Soldier" were similar to the...

Lorre's first line in the movie (he has appeared without speaking prior to this) is wonderfully macabre, even if it turns out to have a mundane explanation. This is a good movie that straddles the line between horror and noir. (I think it was released as a horror film and is now seen as the first no...

Interestingly, I read Sidney Lumet's "Making Movies" in which he said that Hitchcock made the same film over and over. So clearly a lot of filmmakers felt that way about Hitchcock. Perhaps it was jealousy over the fact that Hitchcock made himself a celebrity at a time when the general publ...

I don't know why Scorsese hasn't worked more with DeNiro in recent years. Maybe they feel they have done all they can together. (When "Casino" came out, a lot of reviews said the movie had a "seen it already" feel.) Or it may be economic. Scorsese seems to take a while to get his...

"Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed" is one of my favorite Hammer films (and horror films in general.) It is quite suspenseful and has a great momentum that builds and builds. I am always amazed when people dismiss it as "ordinary" or "out of date," as if people should have...

Perhaps this is a failing of mine. Perhaps I was exposed to too many snooty Francophiles at an early age in college. However, I've never been that taken with Jacques Tati, despite hearing people go on and on about his comic genius. The European comic actor whom I adore is Alberto Sordi. I know he di...

Is it just me, or does Warner Brothers seem to drop out of the noir sweepstakes pretty fast after "The Big Sleep" is released?

This film has a number of fine performances. I like Victor Francen as a retired spy who narrates the flashback in which Dimitrios ruins a government clerk who eventually committed suicide. Francen is so blase about the whole business that one almost forgets that he is talking about someone's life.

As for the Hammer Dracula films, apparently Dracula was not supposed to appear in "Taste the Blood of Dracula," and he was only added in shortly before the movie finished filming. So I can see the problem there. I've never really understood how the Baron (Peter Cushing) escaped from the gu...

"Lost in Translation" has to be the most overrated film in recent years. I didn't see it in theaters, but my wife got it when it came out on VHS. We watched it, and it just seemed mediocre. In fact, I got upset because it never seemed to settle down and be about something, an affair or a m...