A half-dozen genres are merrily mixed together in “The Bat,” the wild and often zany 1926 silent feature based on a Broadway play written by Mary Roberts Rinehard and Avery Hopwood, which in turn was based on Rinehart’s novel “The Circular Staircase” (1908).
Continue reading
Ghouls and Boils! Hear ye, hear ye!
Our Great Pumpkin Giveaway is back! Similar to last year but easier. All you need to do to win this year is to email your name to cinemacrazedgiveaway@gmail.com and we will draw a few names on the 31st.
A woman training hard to enter a bullfighting competition soon finds herself in a situation where the men around here are dying one by one.
When I was 10 years old, I thought the 1962 Hammer Film Productions version of “The Phantom of the Opera” was one of the greatest movies ever made. Today – far removed from that 10-year-old version of myself – the slavish enthusiasm I once had for this flick has evaporated, but I still have a fondness for the film’s offbeat charms.
Continue reading
In 1973, Bing Crosby Productions was focusing on churning out low-budget flicks that were heavily marketed with exploitative flair. (Despite the company’s name, Crosby himself was not directly involved in the creation of these efforts.) With films including “Willard” (1971), “Ben” (1972), “You’ll Like My Mother” (1972) and “Walking Tall” (1973), the company offered a happy blend of violence, horror and thrills in contemporary settings. These titles proved very popular, and the company decided to dust off the concept of a wax museum setting for a horror film and brought back Jack the Ripper as key figure in its murder plot.
Continue reading
A woman working with the local firefighters’ rescue team who is called to a retirement home due to the building being unstable and needing to be evacuated finds that the task will be much more complex than expected and that perhaps the evacuation is not why they were called there.
A father and son duo are called to an emergency plumbing problem. Only there are a few issues, one being the son’s germaphobia and the other being that it’s not exactly what they’d expect blocking the drains.