Jules White was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the greatest comedy director – but he might have been the resourceful. With the 1956 Three Stooges short “Scheming Schemers,” he created a new film by using stock footage from three different movies while putting forth a work where one of the stars had passed away six weeks earlier.
Continue reading
This 1971 feature from the American International Pictures fun factory is a work at odds with itself. It wants to be campy, but it is never that funny. It wants to be a horror film, but poor direction dilutes the effectiveness of the chills. And while it succeeds as a Vincent Price vehicle, it fails to bring along the rest of the cast for the ride.
Continue reading
One of the least credible theories regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper insists the serial killer was Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a practicing physician prior to gaining wider fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes with the publication of “A Study in Scarlet” in 1887. There is no evidence – not even the most frayed wisp of preposterous circumstance – to place Conan Doyle in Whitechapel at the time of the killings, let alone providing him with a motive for the crimes.
Moe, Larry and Shemp receive a telegram from their roommate/landlord Bill that he just got married and they will need to move out. Rather than be upset by this abrupt eviction, the trio decide to surprise Bill and his new bride by cleaning the residence and installing a television that Bill ordered as a wedding gift. Needless to say, the best of intentions generates the worst possible results.
Continue reading
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
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
The Three Stooges (Moe, Larry and Shemp) run the Super Slueth Detective Agency (yes, the typo is part of the company’s name) and their specialty is “Divorce Evidence Manufactured to Your Order.” They are hired to find a missing young woman and their strategy is to canvas the area where she disappeared by disguising themselves as door-to-door pie salesmen handing out free samples. When they hear her scream from a seemingly abandoned house, they gain entrance and find they are in the lair of the crazed scientist Dr. Jekyll, who with his fearsome henchman Mr. Hyde are planning to transplant the young woman’s brain into a gorilla that they are keeping in a cage.
Continue reading