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Review Index There Will Be Blood Coen Bros. Popeye Coen Bros. Help Martin & Lewis The Untouchables The Addams Family The Flesh & the Fiends Private Lives of Adam & Eve Audition The Shaggy Dog Ray Harryhausen Ten DVD Reviews Konga Rutherford & Marple Merian C. Cooper Satan in High Heels Naked as Nature Intended The Trip/Psych-Out The Unearthly Who Killed Teddy Bear Susan George William Castle Storytelling Ghost World Visitor Q Circus of Horrors The Return of the Vampire Five Weeks in a Balloon Dark Eyes of London The Incredible Mr. Limpet The Ghastly One Brigitte Bardot Amelie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Go!

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For most of the Sixties, Australia’s Rod Taylor owned America’s box office. The cheerfully pugnacious actor barreled his way through the tumultous decade with an equally protean body of work that produced, in alarmingly quick secession, pop-cultural touchstones (The Birds and The Time Machine), light romantic comedies (Do Not Disturb with Doris Day) and grim mercenary thrillers (Dark of the Sun co-starring Jim Brown.)

Working alongside the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Michaelangelo Antonioni, Taylor put a sophisticated spin on the standard-issue Action Hero; the actor possessed a coiled intelligence that was just as intimidating as his fists and was able to make even a bloody barroom brawl seem nuanced. But it took Walt Disney to bring attention to Taylor’s most overlooked gift, his voice. Read more

Whether calmly dispatching a charging lion or cooly commandeering a bull elephant, Tarzan personified the noble savage, an uncivilized man who navigated the treacherous jungle terrain with the street-wise savvy of a New York cab driver. As portrayed by Johnny Weismuller, Tarzan’s vocabulary may have been limited to grunts, howls and the occasional pronoun but his native intelligence was never in doubt.

But what if Tarzan was as dumb as he sounded? Jay Ward and Bill Scott answered that question in 1967 with George of the Jungle, an animated parody that transforms Weismuller’s original aborigine into a very silly savage. Like Tarzan, George is a brawny, gung-ho hero, but it’s clear that this particular Jungle Jim has swung into one too many trees. Read more

“…a vast plain, men crouched in uncomfortable positions, they show every symptom of distress… and now and then, amid grunts and groans, they cry out with excitement and triumph.”

That primal passage from Upton Sinclair is brought to life in the equally raw beginning to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Faustian epic, There Will Be Blood, based on Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!. Read more

Help, the 1965 musical comedy directed by Richard Lester, stars Leo McKern as the venal Clang, a mad cult leader and Victor Spinetti as the underhanded Professor Foot, a mad scientist who’s both Clang’s soulmate and adversary. Each of these crooks subscribe to different credos but they’re after the same thing, power, and they can get it by obtaining an elusive mystic ring with magical capabilities. That ring currently resides on the finger of Ringo Starr, the drummer for The Beatles who are also the co-stars of Help. Read more

Seventy five years after their first appearance in theaters, Max Fleischer’s Popeye cartoons have arrived on dvd, anchored in a simple yellow boxset perfectly suited to the upright sailor’s sunny nature and modest disposition. The cartoons, each boasting a startlingly sharp image, are presented in chronological order spread over four discs which house an abundance of thoughtful, well-produced documentaries detailing Popeye’s leap from the Sunday funnies to the Saturday matinee. Read more