Right up until the end, when the subtitle “Chapter One” gets used for the first time, I thought It (2017) would be a standalone movie. Then the jig was up because blockbusters aren’t like TV shows. They don’t tease sequels ...

Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) didn’t come to post-war Berlin for romance (and she doesn’t fall in love because she’s the only woman amongst her male colleagues). She came as part of a congressional committee to look into the morale ...

What would you say if I told you there was a silent comedian contemporary of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin who used stop animation in his shorts? Raymond Borde didn’t know his name, either, when he found three of his ...

While the openings to Fred Walton’s The Sitter (1977), When A Stranger Calls (1979), and When A Stranger Calls Back (1993) don’t match-up completely, they are remarkably similar, and when it comes to The Sitter and When A Stranger Calls ...

The first time I started Slovak director Stefan Uher’s The Miraculous Virgin (Panna Zázracnica, 1966), it didn’t end. I started the film over before it was finished, but it was the right call because the second time I decided to ...

Not every spy can be James Bond but then Gerald Arthur Otley (Tom Courtenay) never meant to be a spy in the first place. When he’s not being pulled into matters of classified intelligence, Otley is a man absorbed with ...

Maybe being granted three wishes was never a straightforward process, but there must have been a time when they were something to hope for, because despite all the horror stories of wishes gone bad, the idea that they can help ...

Following the success of his adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1974), At The Earth’s Core (1976) was the second of three films Kevin Connor directed adapting Burroughs’ works for Amicus Productions. The third, The People ...

I used to think once you knew one killer Santa, you knew them all. Not after reading Spectacular Optical’s Yuletide Terror. A book churning with more killer Santas than you’d ever want to meet in a lifetime (assuming you survived ...

At the end of the short film, “Birdboy” (2011), Dinki asks the title character to fly her away. In the follow-up film, Psychonauts, The Forgotten Children (Psiconautas, Los Niños Olvidados, 2015), Dinki is looking for ways off the island herself, ...