Really?  He was a wonderful raconteur at Mad Monster Party last year, telling great anecdotes about Gable and Groucho and being part of the comedy team Hong and Leung.  He dominated the BLADERUNNER panel with Joe Turkel and Rutger Hauer, and gave Hauer hilarious shit about being the whitest man he knew and also his…

Is this another film that would have us believe that the women hanged (not burned) at Salem were evil and practicing black magic?  If so, perhaps Mr. Zombie would like to make a film about Jews sacrificing children.

Bourdain addressed this in an interview with Andrew Zimmern in the Delta in flight magazine I happened to read today.  He basically said that he became what you call a hypocrite whore precisely because it would make people like you (and me) uncomfortable and challenge our smug assumptions.   Here, I just found it…

I read THE GREEN HORNET right after HAWKGUY #9 today, and of course the former suffered by comparison.  But even aside from that, the writing seemed stodgy and rote, particularly the dialogue (although it was even worse on STEED AND PEEL, where the dialogue really needed to sparkle).  Sure, the emphasis on the power…

A Valkyrie is a supernatural emissary.  According to Wikipedia, the Angel of Death was a real ceremonial position in Viking society, held by an old woman whose job was to prepare the dead for ceremonial burning, and to cut the throats of any slaves that accompanied them.

What the Hell was that playing the Angel of Death?  Was it actually a woman?  Was she actually that huge?  She was bigger than Brienne, and taller than anyone else on this show by a head.

Col. Parker was very upset at Ann-Margret's casting in VIVA, LAS VEGAS and tried to get the director not to use her.  He knew she was going to steal the film.  Fortunately, Elvis wanted her (in more ways than one).

Remember the episode where COBRA put up a satellite that jammed all TV and replaced it with new programming like a version of the Smurfs where the moral is that it's bad to look different or have disagreements, a TV show called FATHER KNOWS BEAST, and a version of KING KONG where Kong wins?  The moral of all this…

I believe the nightmarish horse and gingerbread girl sequences were actually shot by the second unit director, CEMETERY MAN's Michele Soavi.

My dad loved Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm books — along with Dick Francis and Rex Stout, they were his favorite thrillers.  Once I was 12 and had read the James Bond novels, he kept trying to get me to tackle Helm.  He'd curse and change the channel whenever one of the Dean Martin movies came on TV.

The title story in MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS kills me every time I read it.  Probably because some friends of mine who were Buffy fans and met ritualistically at my house on Tuesday  nights introduced Kelly to the show via VHS tape, and I see some of that time and those people in the story (also, Gordon Strangle Mars makes…

I believe that "theory" was introduced by Jules Feiffer  in THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES in the early 70s.  He would have been talking about the Golden Age Superman, as Feiffer had no knowledge of or interest in the then-contemporary version.

I skimmed the first issue (or rather, first new issue, not the Grant Morrison reprint) of STEED AND PEEL at the local comic book shop and it was awful.  The quips were leaden and it revived The Hellfire Club in such a way as to stress its influence on the X-Men villains.  London is nuked and Steed and Mrs. Peel team…

Mrs. Peel as the Queen of Sin and Peter Wyngarde as the leader of the modern day Hellfire Club were a huge influence on  the X-Men's baddies of the same name. 

I love the film, but one thing has always bothered me about Linnea Quigley's resurrection, even though I know it's a silly nitpick.  Why didn't the zombies eat her?  We see her overwhelmed by a mob of them, but Zombie Linnea doesn't sport a single bite mark and the contents of her skull appear intact.

I know this wasn't what the show was about, but I would like to have seen more of the clip and been given some context for them.  We get snatches of a CBC (I think) production of MACBETH with a young Sean Connery (circa DOCTOR NO) as Macbeth, but we barely hear him deliver a line.  Nor does John Finch get to deliver a…

There seemed to be a lot of irrelevant footage of a glowering Hawke wandering New York City in a hooded coat.  The backgrounds chosen for the Richardson piece were far more appropriate and less distracting — the Globe Theatre (some gorgeous shots of it at night with snow falling), a beach, the real Forrest of Arden.

Jacobi is apparently going to get into all that nonsense in his episode, according to the New York Times piece on the series.

It can be hard to watch Itami's joyous movies, knowing his fate.  Particularly MINBO: THE GENTLE ART OF JAPANESE EXTORTION, which delightful and trenchant as it is, made him a Yakuza target.  MINBO actually shows the Yakuza manufacturing scandals about their enemies, such as the later scandal that supposedly resulted…

Wolbrook is also wonderful in COLONEL BLIMP.  The scene where he tells the immigration officer about his Nazi son is heart-breaking.