Dead Pigeon On Beethoven Street (1972)

I always loved the use of Can’s ‘Vitamin C’ in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, but you know who used it first in a private eye flick way back in the 1970s? Samuel Fuller did, shooting an episode of a German crime TV anthology in West Germany (called Tartot) and spinning that into his own […]

Underworld USA (1961)

I was in the mood for a classic black-and-white film noir that I hadn’t seen and selected Underworld USA (1961) because it was a Samuel Fuller film (of Pickup On South Street and Shock Corridor), which he directed, wrote and produced. On a New Year’s Eve in the back alleys of a city, a young […]

A Return To Salem’s Lot (1987)

This was a wacky one. Part of the wave of Stephen King adaptations that were only tangentially related to their source material and clogged up the video shelves in the late 80s and early 90s, A Return To Salem’s Lot (1987) is a sequel to Stephen King’s novel and the TV miniseries, which is directed […]

The State Of Things (1982)

I’ve always been curious about The State Of Things (1982; Der Stand der Dinge), a black-and-white movie Wim Wenders directed after his German road movie trilogy. I didn’t realise it was actually something he made while he was on a break having a tough time filming the detective movie Hammett (based on Dashiell Hammett) in […]

Shock Corridor (1963)

Diving deeper into the world of director Samuel Fuller, I finally watched Shock Corridor (1963), which I remember Martin Scorsese playing clips of in his Personal Journey Through American Cinema docu-series (now on Kanopy, which this film is available to stream too). Shot over ten days in one location, this low budget thriller follows journalist […]