The main thing you need to know about John Boorman’s 1974 sci-fi classic, Zardoz, is that, for most of the movie, Sean Connery wears this costume:

I’m glad not only that I live in a world in which Zardoz exists, but also that I live in the world in which the circumstances that allow Zardoz’s existence could happen. That is, the window for Zardoz’s possible existence is only that period in 1974 when it was released: two years after director John Boorman made Deliverance and three years before Star Wars …

In Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character goes to a shady, back alley doctor (Peter Stormare) to get his eyeballs replaced. While Cruise recovers, a wall-sized television projects an image or Robert Ryan shooting a man in a Japanese-style hot tub.
That short, violent, beautifully shot scene comes from Samuel Fuller’s brutal 1955 noir classic House of Bamboo, and it seems an odd reference for Spielberg to make. While Spielberg is a technically brilliant director on many levels, he lacks the sensibility to make a movie …

“Riders to the stars, that is what we are, every time we kiss in the night”: so begins the theme song to the 1954 sci-fi film, Riders to the Stars. I get the distinct feeling that the writers of this song weren’t given a lot of direction regarding the movie’s plot.
After the opening titles and theme song, a voice-over narrator explains that humans have conquered every challenge except one: space. Yeah, it sure was nice to have every conceivable human problem licked by 1954…
Riders to the …

Movies in the film noir genre are known for having a bleak view of human nature, but few are as overwhelmingly bleak as Edmund Goulding’s 1947 adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s classic noir novel Nightmare Alley. The movie traces the rise and fall of con man Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) as he goes from side show barker to nightclub mentalist to spiritual advisor for Chicago’s wealthiest citizens, all the while using and leaving behind the people that aid his success. Instead of a conventional morality that divides humans into good …

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) is on my short list of all-time favorite movies, where it stands out as odd against Planet of the Apes, Fargo, Blade Runner, Sunset Boulevard, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Fistful of Dollars, Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, and the other denizens of the always-changing list. And while I have been known to squirt a few when Peter O’Toole emerges from the desert, or when Alec Guinness destroys the bridge, or when General Patton acknowledges the magnificent bastardry of …

Right off the bat, I want to point out that They Came from Beyond Space has a misleading title. The film’s alien race (the “They” of the title) actually come from the moon, which is definitely not “Beyond Space.” And if you want to get technical about it, before they arrived on the moon, they were on their home planet, which is also actually within space. I say this not to be pedantic, but as a warning in case the title got you all excited because it might …

One can learn several important things from crap-auteur Bill “Monster-a-Go-Go” Rebane’s 1987 film Twister’s Revenge! First, no matter how awesome one might think it is, taking the concept of Knight Rider and applying it to a monster truck is absolutely not awesome. Second, there is a good reason why some of the world’s greatest detectives–Jim Rockford, Starsky and Hutch, Hardcastle and McCormick, Tenspeed and Brownshoe, the Scooby Doo Gang–were not known for conducting their investigations with a monster truck. And third, monster truck action does not translate well to …

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 …