Notizie

“Woman Warriors in Brutal Death Battle!” This adventure thriller has no reputation to speak of, and is mainly notable as a strange chapter in the topsy-turvy life of Curt Siodmak, who as a producer-writer-director, filmed this and another equally absurd jungle romp on location in Brazil. How Siodmak got these pictures going is a mystery — they received national releases, in Technicolor through Universal-International. CineSavant makes its best, wholly un-researched guesses, breaking all the rules of ethical film reportage. But honest, this is the jungle fantasy populated by Amazon warriors — all painted green.

Love Slaves of the Amazons

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1957 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 81 min. / Street Date June 14, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Don Taylor, Gianna Segale, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harvey Chalk, Wilson Viana, Eugenio Carlos, Tom Payne, Gilda Nery, Ana Maria Nabuco, John Herbert, Louis Serrano — and Paul Frees, times six.

Cinematography: Mario Pagés

Art Director: Pierino Massenzi

Film Editors: Oswald Hafenrichter,...

Westerns are populated with cowboys, gunslingers, bandits, Native American, horses, cows and buffalos. But the genre is much more complex than shoot-‘em-ups. In fact, the best Westerns are Shakespearean in nature exploring such universal subjects as love, hate, revenge, greed, power and good versus evil. One of the most popular sub-genres is the “ranch” Western where the patriarch or matriarch — remember Barbara Stanwyck in “The Big Valley”– governs with a strict and often violent hand. They act like they are above the law and often take legal matters into their own hand. They are often widowers or widows and have sons who run the spectrum from hero to villain.

Jane Campion’s highly acclaimed Netflix Oscar-contender “The Power of the Dog” falls into this sub-genre. Set in Montana in 1925, the story revolves around the charismatic but sadistic Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) who relishes being the master of a cattle rancher.

When not making tons of money collaborating with James Stewart, Anthony Mann directed some really grim westerns. This mini-epic spells out the ugly real-life Code of The West: seizing land and establishing private empires. Walter Huston’s T.C. Jeffords maintains his sprawling fiefdom through economic tyranny (he prints his own money and expects banks to accept it) — and by simple violence, murdering the people that have lived on ‘his’ land for generations. Barbara Stanwyck is the feisty heir who wages generational war on her piratical father. It’s the darkest and most subversive of Huac-era ‘noir’ westerns.

The Furies

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 435

1950 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 109 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 20, 2021 / 39.95

Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, Gilbert Roland, Thomas Gomez, Beulah Bondi, Albert Dekker, John Bromfield, Wallace Ford, Blanche Yurka.

Cinematography: Victor Milner

Film Editor: Archie Marshek

Original Music:...

It’s controversy in the Black Lagoon! Universal releases a much-desired box of all three Gill Man epics — but goes cheap on the encoding and hands us a 3-D rendering of Revenge of the Creature at half-resolution. When is a Blu-ray not a Blu-ray? When it’s not even full HD. And all that after commissioning a state-of-the-art 4k 3-D video remaster!

Creature From the Black Lagoon: Complete Legacy Collection

Creature from the Black Lagoon (3-D + 2-D), Revenge of the Creature (3-D) + 2-D, The Creature Walks Among Us (2-D)

Blu-ray

Universal Studios Home Entertainment

1954-1956 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 79, 82, 78 min. / Street Date August 28, 2018 / 39.98

Starring: Julie Adams, Lori Nelson, Leigh Snowden, Nestor Paiva, Richard Carlson, Jeff Morrow, John Agar, Rex Reason, Richard Denning, John Bromfield, Jeff Morrow, Greg Palmer…

and as the Gill Man: Ricou Browning, Ben Chapman, Don Megowan, others.

Cinematography: William E. Snyder; Charles S. Welbourne; Maury Gertsman

Film...

It’s funny how much one year can change something as niche as a bizarre subgenre of ’50s monster movies. A year ago, the Crypt of Curiosities kicked off with a piece that touched on tons of different films in the “Gillsploitation” genre, a silly little corner of horror cinema that riffed on Jack Arnold’s classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon to deliver all sorts of bizarre B-movie delights. There were your run of the mill rip-offs, there were Vincent Price films, hell, there were even Japanese monster movies and Italian gore-fests. It was a short-lived, sparsely populated subgenre, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting there to be any real big Gill-Man films again after Carpenter’s Creature from the Black Lagoon reboot got canned in the ’90s.

And then a little movie called The Shape of Water came out and changed everything. Suddenly,...

Coleen Gray in 'The Sleeping City' with Richard Conte. Coleen Gray after Fox: B Westerns and films noirs (See previous post: “Coleen Gray Actress: From Red River to Film Noir 'Good Girls'.”) Regarding the demise of her Fox career (the year after her divorce from Rod Amateau), Coleen Gray would recall for Confessions of a Scream Queen author Matt Beckoff: I thought that was the end of the world and that I was a total failure. I was a mass of insecurity and depended on agents. … Whether it was an 'A' picture or a 'B' picture didn't bother me. It could be a Western movie, a sci-fi film. A job was a job. You did the best with the script that you had. Fox had dropped Gray at a time of dramatic upheavals in the American film industry: fast-dwindling box office receipts as a result of competition from television,...

Coleen Gray ca. 1950. Coleen Gray dead at 92: Leading lady in early Stanley Kubrick film noir classic Actress Coleen Gray, best known for Stanley Kubrick's crime drama The Killing, has died. Her death was announced by Classic Images contributor Laura Wagner on Facebook's “Film Noir” group. Wagner's source was David Schecter, who had been friends with the actress for quite some time. Via private message, he has confirmed Gray's death of natural causes earlier today, Aug. 3, '15, at her home in Bel Air, on the Los Angeles Westside. Gray (born on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska) was 92. Coleen Gray movies As found on the IMDb, Coleen Gray made her film debut as an extra in the 20th Century Fox musical State Fair (1945), starring Jeanne Crain and Dana Andrews. Her association with film noir began in 1947, with the release of Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947), notable for showing Richard Widmark...

Previously, during the two week long 3-D film festival at the Egyptian Theatre, I had the pleasure to watch Creature From The Black Lagoon, House Of Wax, It Came From Outer Space, The Mad Magician and Jaws 3-D. This past Saturday night, I completed my experience with the World 3-D Film Expo with a screening of Jack Arnold’s Revenge Of The Creature, the sequel to the Universal classic Creature From The Black Lagoon.

As with many of the other screenings, I got to see Revenge in the format it was intended to be seen in, dual 35 mm, in luscious 3-D. The film had some great 3-D gags, and some fantastic underwater sequences, and didn’t look much worse for wear in comparison with Joe Alves’ Jaws 3-D. In fact, after seeing them both in such a short time, I was startled by the similarity in the two movies (in the less heralded sequels,...