The Ambulance (1990)

I distinctly remember reading Marvel comics when I was a kid, Spider-Man or Captain America, and they always included a little editorial from Stan Lee, and there were a few issues of him promoting The Ambulance (1990), a thriller starring Eric Roberts that was written and directed by Larry Cohen (Q – The Winged Serpent, […]

Petrol (2023)

Petrol (2023) is a new Australian film from director Alena Lodkina. I had only caught up recently with her first, Strange Colours, which screened at Revelation Film Festival and is a father-daughter drama set in the Lightning Ridge opal mining bushlands of New South Wales, which I found to be authentic and artful, patiently compelling. […]

Fear Is The Key (1972)

Barry Newman is best known for playing the enigmatic driver in the car chase movie Vanishing Point, and I also know him playing Peter Fonda’s security man several decades later in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey. To see him play a tough guy role like in Fear Is The Key (1972), he is wiry and compact, […]

The Fifth Cord (1971)

The Fifth Cord (1971) is a visually striking giallo thriller from Italy. While there’s plenty of fashionable outfits and stylish interior decorating, there’s an emphasis on figures placed against colossal pieces of architecture, or the use of shadows against lit windows and lamplight reflected by glass. During one sequence where petals drift through the frame […]

House On Haunted Hill (1999)

The ghost of an ooky kooky spooky 1950s William Castle is haunting the set of the Nine Inch Nails ‘Closer’ music video (or vice versa). That’s the experience of House On Haunted Hill (1999), the first movie from Dark Castle Entertainment, a production company from Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler, initially set up […]