Richard Brooks’s 1966 Western The Professionals does not have the same level of notoriety as a revisionist Western that the works of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah have, but it deserves an important place in the history of the genre nonetheless.
In particular, it sets the stage for the two great revisionist westerns that were to come a few years later: Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. For the former, The Professionals introduced Claudia Cardinale to American audiences and gave Woody Strode his …

When I first heard of the 1963 film Hercules, Samson, & Ulysses, I had hoped it would be about the classical Greek hero teaming up with the Old Testament strongman to tackle James Joyce’s dense modernist novel, but that turns out not to be the case. Instead, it’s one of the last films in the Italian sword-and-sandal epic cycle, which began with Pietro Francisci’s 1958 Hercules film starring Steve Reeves.
If this story had existed in the classical world, it would have been the equivalent of the Superman and Spider-Man team-ups …

Doctor K’s Cult Classics: Five Graves to Cairo
The word “atrocity” often gets bandied about fairly liberally to describe crimes that don’t quite rise to that level of seriousness. However, it is perfectly apt to use the term in relation to the fact that the 1943 film Five Graves to Cairo, Billy Wilder’s second film as a director, is not available on DVD. Ever since its release, Five Graves to Cairo has lived in the shadow of another, similar film from the previous year–Casablanca. That film, however, does …

Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire is the fourth book in the Gabriel Hunt series of adventure novels created by Charles Ardai, founder of the Hard Case Crime imprint. The conceit of the series is that modern adventurer Gabriel Hunt authors each novel (though, curiously, none are narrated in the first person) with the help of a different writer. So far, the series has been a mixed bag, but even at their weakest, the novels remain entertaining and diverting. However, Christa Faust’s contribution to the series, Hunt Beyond …

Billed as Donald Westlake’s “final novel,” Memory is actually an early novel, written in the 1960s but never published, by the great mystery and noir writer. Following the writer’s death in December 2008, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai announced the aquisition of this unpublished work, which had been rejected by Westlake’s agent early in the writer’s career. Memory, in fact, is barely a crime novel: it begins with a crime, and it does have a noirish feel; plus, there is something of a mystery involved. Police occasionally …

Several of the Bureau Chiefs are now heavily into the new HBO series Treme, as most of us were big fans of creator David Simon’s earlier HBO project, The Wire.  Doctor K, Ken Lowery, Benjamin Birdie, Eugene Ahn and Matt Wilson sat down around the virtual table and have a discussion of their impressions of the series so far, especially as they weigh it against their experience with the earlier show.

When watching as many cult movies as I do, I get a tiny frisson of pleasure from the frequent appearance of certain character actors who made their careers in low budget movies. Case in point, this week’s movie, Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), starring William Smith.

Jim Brown, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Dick Butkus, Bubba Smith, Howie Long, Brian Bosworth–the National Football League has been the cradle of action stars for decades, more than any other sport. And nowhere is that more apparent than in this week’s film, The Black 6, starring six of the best NFL players from 1973: the 49ers’ Gene Washington, the Vikings’ Carl Eller, the Dolphins’ Mercury Morris, the Steelers’ Mean Joe Greene, the Lions’ Lem Barney, and the Chiefs’ Willie Lanier.
The Black 6 is basically yet another remake of Seven …

I often like to play a mental game with movie history that I call “What If ___________ Were Star Wars,” where I try to imagine what that history would be like if a certain movie had the same level of popularity and creative or financial influence as Star Wars.  With Peter Yates’s 1976 masterpiece about private ambulance drivers in Los Angeles, Mother, Jugs & Speed, we get a sense of what movies would be like if Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H had been the most popular and influential movie of all time.
In …

Last week’s film, The Oscar, represents a common type of cult film: the bad movie that reaches such a sublime level of awfulness that it transcends its quality and achieves a level of entertainment on its own. (I hesitate to use the common phrase “so bad it’s good” because I don’t think these movies ever become “good” by any measure of quality–they are still bad movies, but they do become entertaining in their own special way).  These are the types of movies featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they …