11/10/6 - 11/21/6

john benjamin cribbs

In October 2006, Funderburg and Cribbs set out to watch at least 200 movies over the course of the next 200 days. They both watched a different slate of films and wrote about every single one; from epic high art masterpieces such as Max Ophul's The Earrings of Madame de... to lesser films by great directors like Richard Linklater's It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books to idiotic dreck like A Night at the Museum. In sections spanning 10 days at a time, The Pink Smoke is reprinting their writings about the grueling experiment in cinematic endurance.

<<click here for 11/2/6 - 11/9/6>>

THREE MOVIES I HAVEN'T SEEN SINCE HIGH SCHOOL:

11.10.06. Jules et Jim.

I didn't have a religious epiphany growing up. Wasn't seduced by a political speech or floored by an introspective revelation. Instead I saw The 400 Blows and it blew my mind (400 times?) It's the first movie I ever saw with subtitles (I don't count Return of the Jedi), something that wasn't Drop Dead Fred or Suburban Commando. Truffaut had the distinction of popping my arthouse cherry (which I'm sure he wouldn't be proud to hear, I'm pretty sure that dude was into the ladies) and impressed upon me the importance, nay the existence, of a cinema without Pauly Shore. And then what happened? The same thing that happens in every first relationship: the cooler, more dangerous guy came along to show the impudent newbie what they were missing. That guy's name was Godard. By the time I got back to Truffaut, I'd seen A bout de souffle, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le fou, Weekend...when I finally saw Jules et Jim, my second Truffaut, it might as well have starred Pauly Shore. Since then, Truffaut was the "nice guy," the safe bet, Godard was the rebel.

Why revisit the nice guy? So recently, having just gotten my girlfriend into the nouvelle vogue, I wanted to go back and give Francois another shot (I only saw Fahrenheit 451 for the first time recently) and decided to start with J & J. Ten minutes in, I realized something: if you don't instantly fall in love with Jeanne Moreau, the movie isn't going to work nearly as well for you as it will for someone who does. It's a New Wave thing: I fell hopelessly for Anna Karina in all Godard's movies, for Jean Seberg in Breathless. I did not fall for Moreau the first time and I didn't this time: there's something missing for me. Over the years I've had a clear vision of her character from this movie, how being romantic and wild can be devastatingly tragic. But knowing that character, I don't see Moreau's performance as successful, even though she fits perfectly Oskar Werner's description of "not especially beautiful or intelligent or sincere, but a real woman." Doesn't work for me, I don't know why. And it makes it honestly hard to get past and admire the movie's undeniably great touches: the cigar-smoking girl's impression of a train, the still frames of Catherine's face, Jim's monologue about the soldier writing letters to the woman he'd never met.

Another strange thing about this movie is the reputation it has for being wholly light and romantic, as showcased in the Sixpence None the Richer video. This has apparently been purported by people who either only watched the first 20 minutes of the movie, or decided that every scene after that didn't exist. The rest of it is dark and incredibly depressing. And it kind of lingers - it lingers at a mature, dramatic pace steeped in almost intolerable melancholy and despair once those light scenes are over. It's a good thing I fell out of the movie in high school, or I might've thought 'Jesus is love really like this? Does friendship really end this way?' The verdict: I still think of J & J as overrated, but I do blame myself for never being able to get into it. I'm looking forward to reviewing more of Truffaut's movies, and seeing others for the first time.

11.11.06. Easy Rider.

I'd be curious to know how much longer Easy Rider is going to hold up.  I guess as long as the road movie is glorified by the art film masses, Rider will hold its place as their king.  A pastoral pictorial of a counterculture that really needed a Charlie Manson, the film represents the end of an era, of a way of life - but maybe that's a good thing, as opposed to the downbeat reaction the film attaches to its fatalism.  For all its criticism of the American south, its stretches of lonely desert highway (actually what this film could really use is more shots of the bikes headed down the road, Dennis Hopper pulling up then back behind as Peter Fonda stares majestically forward) and its mausoleum scene that inspired thousands of bad student films, not much of a case is made for the preservation of the protagonists' ideals.  

Fonda, ridiculously handsome as Captain America, and Hopper as Billy, his exasperated use of the word "man" some kind of cinematic record, act exactly like the pair of potheads they are: self-mythologizing cultural cowboys, their mission to unload some coke in New Orleans brimming with a baffling significance.  As poignant a line as "We blew it" is, the "it" to which Wyatt refers has become more archaically elusive with the passing of time.  What exactly is it they stood for?  Is there anything that separates Rider from the 500 other psychedelic biker flicks made in that same period?  Has the impact of the film been completely marginalized by its own pomposity (recent use of footage in a TV commercial would seem to support that?)  The verdict: The story behind the film is infinitely more interesting than the movie itself - it's more effective to know that the statue Fonda is sobbing uncontrollably over, telling "I hate you," is supposed to represent his mother, who committed suicide when he was a kid.  There's also a lot of controversy over the screen credit, but to me it seems obvious that Terry Southern wrote all the material for Jack Nicholson's Dr. Gonzo-inspired lawyer (you know, plot-oriented stuff) and all the other dialogue was written by Mary Jane.

11.12.06. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

"Morgan's Creek - is that in MY state???"  This is one of Preston Sturges' more controversial masterpieces (and the first of his I ever saw.)  Made in 1944, it deals with bigamy, suicide and underage pregnancy - not as hot issues, just realistic ones.  Betty Hutton stars as Trudy, a girl in a small town who parties too hard at a big Farewell to the Troops dance, gets married, gets pregnant, can't remember the soldier's name, and so turns to Eddie Bracken for help.  Bracken, in the first of two war-set films for the director, plays Norville (a name appropriated by the Coens for The Hudsucker Proxy), the quintessential Sturges sub-hero, a naive boob duped by a devilish female, herself about to be transformed by his inherent goodness (that also was appropriated by Hudsucker.)  Somehow Sturges manages to make Norville's affection both mockingly green and charmingly sweet ("Remember the church lawn party where you sat in the apple butter and they blamed me for it?")  

Needless to say, attempts to keep Hutton's condition secret create new, more troublesome convolutions which pave the way for Sturges' intricate layering of confusion at its best: there's an amazing moment where William Demarest (in his best role for Sturges, arguably topping his turn in The Lady Eve) looks directly into the camera in hapless resignation.  This is the kind of classic, seemingly effortless comedic masterwork that derides all the uninspired crap there is today: how did Eddie Bracken become that douchebag Asthon Kuchar over the years?  Morgan's Creek also features some of Sturges' best character names - Mr. Cockenlocker, Captain Ratskywatsky - as well as seven pratfalls, cinema's least daring prison escape and a Hitler cameo. The verdict: Simply, timelessly awesome.

11.13.06. The Seventh Victim.

There's no atmosphere as stark and solemn as in any of Val Lewton's RKO productions. Hitchcock pretty much copied it: specifically in this film, there's a creepy shower sequence featuring an eerie silhouette through the curtain which obviously inspired the famous murder in Psycho. Kim Hunter (in her first role) comes to Manhattan looking for her missing sister, whose throwing in with a ridiculous group of Satan-loving Palladists has put her life in jeopardy. A recurring theme in Lewton's series of genre-transcending B-pictures (especially I Walked with a Zombie and The Body Snatcher) is the acceptance of death, and that theme is the somber analysis of Seventh Victim. Lewton and Mark Robson (his first film, too) conduct the study in shadows of the blackest black & white photography, the ideas infused into the aesthetic. One character walks to his death down a dark corridor, a killer's hand reaches out of an alley like the cat's eyes in the tunnel of Leopard Man. As opposed to the normal thriller elements of "who's going to die?" Seventh Victim does one better and examines the existential question of choosing fate - that of another person, and of oneself. Pretty great scene where Hunter realizes that a drunk being helped by two men on the subway is the man she's just seen murdered.

Some interesting facts from the Shadows in the Dark doc on the same disc: Lewton created the famous crane shot of wounded and dying soldiers for Gone with the Wind when he worked for David O Selznick. He apparently hated Selznick and the movie and wanted to task the crew an impossibly difficult set-up to sabotage production. Also, Lewton and Jacques Tourneur shot the entire storming of the Bastaille for 1935's A Tale of Two Cities. Lewton wrote several novels like No Bed of Her Own, which may sound like sleazy exploitation but was actually the first fictional work to deal with the Depression (take that, Steinbeck!) He was hired as the producer of RKO's line of horror films because someone pointed him out to a studio head at a party as the writer of "horrible novels," to which the executive replied, "Writer of horror novels?  That's perfect!" Lewton died at 46, which sucks.

11.14.06. Burn!.

In Gillo Pontecorvo's film, Marlon Brando is a nobleman working for the British admiralty who - half in England's interest and half for his own pleasure - teaches sugar plantation slaves on the fictional Antilles island of Queimada how to stage a revolution.  Ten years after leaving, he returns as a paid military advisor to the sugar companies to crush the same rebellion he helped start.  His character makes for a pretty portrait of a man lost in the throes of Imperialism: fallible, infinitely corruptible, morally ambivalent (a character Nic Cage would assume for Andrew Niccol's Lord of War.)  Early in the film, Brando's already wondering what will happen after the uprising, what the point of it is.  Later, when he's commanding Portugese soldiers to burn guerillas out of sugar cane fields, he gloats over his "small masterpiece," brushing off personal involvement: "To make money, one has to build.  To continue to make money, sometimes it is necessary to destroy."  It's crazy to see the man who played Zapata embracing this maxim and treating destructive cultural war like a game of toy soldiers, first molding a revolutionary leader out of Jose Dolores (unbelievably well-played by non-actor Evaristo Marquez), then taking everything away from him.  

Next to Il Conformista, Burn! is probably the best movie to scrutinize political imbalance through an individual's moral deterioration (this one has the advantage of not probing its protagonist's sexuality as psychological exposition.)  Nothing is belabored because the issues are nestled inside the drama of civil unrest, class and personal conflict.  With its political agenda filtered through sepia tones, ADR sound work and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, it feels like what would happen if Costa-Gavras made a spaghetti western.  A pretty great film that should serve as a lesson to recent Hollywood movies of the Blood Diamond school of deliberate moralizing: a movie should put story first, message second.

11.15.06. Night of the Following Day.

Here's a movie that really understands cinematic language and uses it to create a masterfully hypnotic crime story. From the serene opening titles and great use of repetitive dialogue in the first scenes to the film's prevalent overcast skies - every scene is aesthetically interesting to watch.  Even its cliches (it has the worst case of "Hey turn on the news and see if there's anything about us") play towards its alluring, dreamlike atmosphere.  The filmmaker is Hubert Cornfield, one of those director-for-hires like Noel Black or Joseph Sargent who made one great film but not much else that merits recognition.  Starring Brando again (it was a weird coincidence), this time as a member of a conspiracy to hold a wealthy man's daughter ransom in a cottage on a desolate French beach.  

Like the best kidnapping movies (Seance on a Wet Afternoon, the first halves of Patti Hearst and The Crying Game, Fargo... Benji) and the worst (The Terrorists, Ransom, the last reel of Flightplan) there's a motley group of ticking timebombs: the unpredictable sociopath (a William Holden-esque Richard Boone), the unreliable flake (Rita Moreno, who doesn't know how to do cocaine) and the antihero who just wants to get the job over with so he can get paid (Brando, natch.)  Nothing new plot-wise (although their elaborate plan for getting the money and cute old school tricks like taping one pay phone to another to throw off police are enjoyable), but deft, calculated filmmaking cooks up several memorable scenes, some that must have inspired famous moments in later movies from Chinatown to Fargo.  And, like Touchez pas au grisbi, when the film breaks out the machine guns in its last 15 minutes, it's a roller coaster ride.  The director (who just passed away this summer) wisely gives Brando an entire scene to showboat ("There aren't gonna be any rainbows!") then gets back to the movie.

11.16.06. Twentieth Century.

After re-watching Miracle of Morgan's Creek, I felt like more madcap mayhem from the Golden Age of Hollywood. While Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were hands down the best screenwriting team of all time, Twentieth Century suffers from its origin as a play.  The first half is amazing, but the second feels claustrophobic, not just because the action is stuck on a train (nearly all of Narrow Margin is too, and that movie's great) but because of how palpable its staginess is: characters' entrances and exits, scenarios set up specifically to further gags, dizzying, repetitious transitions from one cabin back to another.  Of course that's also appropriate, given that the story is about a theater director and his maniacal, manipulative hold over a Broadway starlet who left him at the height of her star power, sinking him into artistic rut and financial ruin.  

In the second half, he's setting the stage for his devious plans to win her back.  But though it may be relevant, it doesn't match up to the brilliant first half - which I take to be all Hecht and MacArthur and Bringing Up Baby-mode Howard Hawks buffoonery: John Barrymore as the director, insanely tracing lines on the wooden floor like a deranged Cy Twombly to mark Carole Lombard's stage directions.  Barrymore has enough energy for six movies: I hate to compare a classic to recent movies again in this blog, but look at his granddaughter stinking up the screen with that dipshit Jimmy Fallon!  Lombard is a puzzle: she's undeniably classy and deserving of her iconic status, but for all the great comedies she was involved with (My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, To Be or Not To Be) she doesn't have the memorable screen mania of Katherine Hepburn, or Betty Hutton in Morgan's Creek.  That said, she and Barrymore play off each other wonderfully.

11.17.06. Edvard Munch.

In preparation for 450 minutes of Bela Tarr's Satantango, I practiced on Peter Watkin's bleak, torturously slow three-plus hour biopic of artist Edvard Munch.  One thing I realized is that it's almost impossible for me to stay interested in long, deliberately-paced melodramas on the small screen: I can't watch Tarkovsky on tv, getting through Passion of Joan of Arc is always a chore.  They belong in a theater, where the overwhelming worlds have greater license to captivate and possess, and I can squeeze in a good ten minute nap if necessary and not lose the continuity of the film too badly.  Otherwise there's a real danger of my mind departing my body, losing interest and idly constructing a rap song for the end credits of the movie I'm watching: "Kristiania Norway - 1884/Nobody digs my shit an' my bitch is a whore" (I model my rap lyrics after the Fresh Prince circa 1989, at the height of Will Smith's power.)  

Watkins has a weird approach to his subject: the film is presented in a numbing, monotone narration taken mostly from Munch's own journals (...mostly...)  The camerawork - and I guess this is unfortunate for Watkins - reminded me of an episode of "The Office;" hand-held shots, numerous zooms into characters' faces and, most notably, the actor playing Munch consciously and constantly breaking the fourth wall.  It's a Bergman-esque technique by the director to establish connection between the viewer and the Bohemian boy genius, framing himself in the lens, the portrait of the artist as a young man under the eye of another artist.  Thematically relevant since none of the figures in Munch's paintings were depicted making eye contact, it says something interesting about stylistic connection in docudrama.  It'd be wild if they developed some kind of technology where the artist in the film looked directly into the camera mid-brush stroke, looked back at the canvas, and a shot of the easel revealed that he's painting YOU!  

Watkin's interests are apparent in the exorbitant amount of time he spends on Munch's Flowers in the Attic-style upbringing, complete ith religious repression, mental illness, tuberculosis that ravaged his family and almost killed him pre-Scream, group baths and alluded-to incest.  "Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life," the artist once stated cheerfully.  Compared to something like Vincent & Theo, Munch crams more Munch trivia into its dense three hours than a college course on expressionism, which probably has something to do with Munch bein a victim of environment more than one of society, more psychologically tormented than generally outcast and therefore more worthy of intimate and lengthy study.

11.18.06. Murder by Decree.

It must have been fashionable in the seventies to pit Jack the Ripper against other historic figures from 1880s Britain.  It's probably because of Time After Time (David Warner gives one of his best performances as Bloody Jack, terrorizing Malcolm McDowell's HG Wells) that the producers of this film decided to use Sherlock Holmes instead of Arthur Conan Doyle, himself an erstwhile investigator of note (and, you know, real person), credited with solving two murder cases in between cooking them up for his famous fictional hero.  Of course the Ripper criminologists have made the White Chapel murderer more a legend than an actual figure by this point, so the irresistibly entertaining what if-? premise of the film is perfectly acceptable. Utilizing Stephen Knight's Final Solution theory involving Freemasons, Royal conspiracy, blackmail and an illegitimate child (Alan Moore used the same basis for From Hell), Murder by Decree's main problem is its treatment of Holmes' detective skills: there's very little deduction involved in his tracking of the murderer(s).  

For example, he ends up stumbling on the killer's coach out of blind luck while cluelessly walking the dark streets of London.  His most helpful hints come from a freaky Donald Sutherland as the alleged "psychic" Robert Lees.  Doyle's Sherlock would never have believed a quack like Lees, much less used his ESP to solve the puzzle.  Decree's Holmes is seen constantly at his lab table studying a grape stem, yet it's never revealed that the killer used grapes to lure his victims into the coach (as in Knight's book.)  Robbed of his superhuman deductive powers, the character is left flat, a humble observer who just KNOWS things can't be right. Christopher Plummer, a predictably suitable Holmes, is nevertheless engaging to watch as always. Although a scene in an insane asylum with Genevive Bujold as Annie Crook has the famously stoic Holmes breaking down like a baby, Plummer finds the correct emotional level to make it work. James Mason finds a good middle ground of helpfulness and doting in his Dr. Watson ("You squashed my pea...") and Bob Clark (did you know he's remaking Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things?) does a servicable directing job despite a hokey Jaws-like murder early in the film.

11.19.06. Wanda.

When Barbara Loden as Wanda, dolled up in curlers hidden under a veil that makes her look like a parody of a bride and a housewife, says "I'm just no good," there's no reveleation in the statement.  It doesn't help her, it's just soemthing she knows about herself, something unchangeable.  Wanda's existence - captured in a three minute long-shot of her walking, oppressively small in a white windbreaker across the dirt mounds of a coal factory - is completely arbitrary, useless and distractingly out of place.  Panged by idleness and a step behind her surroundings, she abandons her husband and kids and eventually hooks up with a jittery amateur criminal.  

Wanda (the movie, not the character, or the fish) is an experience somewhere between the isolating world of Antonioni and the grainy reality of John Cassavetes, but it's somehow more distancing than either.  There's a remarkable artist at work who can texture the psychological ambiguity felt in the enclosed area of a tunnel beneath a wall of catacombs, orchestrate an atmosphere where the magical introduction of a toy plane creates an ethereal interruption and end the movie in the same sort of frozen frame as 400 Blows yet use that effect to punctuate an entirely different emotional stasis.  This is Loden's only directorial effort (she died at 48), and although I would have liked to have seen her adaptation of The Awakening, it's a singular effort that significantly stands alone.  It's a credit to Loden that she would make something so stripped down compared to husband Elia Kazan's glossy work, and that she would cast herself as such a weak-willed character.  It's also reassuring to see such an excellent film by a female director - with the exception of Ida Lupino, Maya Deren and Marguerite Duras, the work of the most renowned female filmmakers (Agnes Varda, Liv Ullmann, Chantal Akerman, Jane Campion) is overrated or inconsistent.* Michael Higgins, in one of the great unknown performances as Mr. Dennis, seems to have inspired JT Walsh's conservative sociopath; his buzz cut, glasses and business dress pre-dates Michael Douglas' boiled-over social avenger of Falling Down.

* John, since I don't agree with this  statement (it feels a little too much like Rush Limbaugh's irritating comments about Donovan McNabb), I'd like to go on record in defense of Agnes Varda (who is far less over-rated and much more consistently awesome than Godard or Rivette or Eustache or Garrell), but also mention Claire Denis, Lucretia Martel, Suzanne Pitt, Barbara Kopple and Lina Wertmueller just off the top of my head... also, what about Betty Thomas - I read an entire article in Entertainment Weekly about how she and Nora Ephron and the gal who made Deep Impact are the vanguard of female filmmakery! How about a film called The Little Rascals - ever heard of it? sincerely, christopher andrew funderburg.

Dear Chris, Thank you for pointing out my accidental exclusion of Claire Denis, who obviously has strong claim to the title of greatest female director of all time. Just want to point out: this was written in 2006 before I'd seen La ciénaga or The Headless Woman and I now gladly recognize Lucrecia Martel as a wonderful and interesting filmmaker. However Kopple, Wertmuller and Varda were exactly who I had in mind when I accused renowned female filmmakers of being overrated and/or inconsistent. Sure they all have their Le bonheurs and Harlan County USAs, but none of them are as reliable or stylistically and thematically sound as Denis. But re-reading this, it is a pretty goddamn stupid thing to say. And at the risk of embarrassing myself, who the heck is Suzanne Pitt?

Suzanne Pitt made Asparagus! It's pretty great. She also made the enjoyable E l Doctor and Joy Street. Also, it turns out her name is "Suzan Pitt," so we are both idiots.

No, I totally agree that sentence sounds too "white men can't jump" of me and would have agreed to delete it. But as you know, a female filmmaker killed my father...

It's far too late for deletion - someone is going to make screencap of this and then Ed Harris won't clap for you when you win an Oscar 50 years from now.

Well I killed Ed Harris' father. Or was that the booze? Anyway, I'll also point out that I'd go to bat for Betty Thomas for her unforgettable performance as the villain in Troop Beverly Hills but have not been overall impressed with her work behind the camera. Perhaps the Alvin and the Chipmunks squeakuel will change my mind...

11.20.06. Vincent & Theo.

"It doesn't matter if the art is good, as long as it sells." I wanted to watch something by Robert Altman the day he died, and this 1990 biodrama is what I had on hand. I think the amazing thing about Altman was that, varied as his filmography was in terms of scope and quality, he didn't believe the above Theo Van Gogh quote. Altman believed in his work, steered away from star power and studio politics, and always made projects he wanted to do at the expense of runaway blockbuster success. It's no wonder he was able to parody the workings of Hollywood in The Player (even though casting Julia Roberts after making fun of casting Julia Roberts was a befuddling move on his part.) No whore like Mrs. Miller, he was an outsider who spent years honing his craft in the drudgery of television, learned the rules, and used each subsequent movie as a new experiment in ways to break them, some of the best of those films (3 Women) made far away from the studios. He had critical admiration, but a landslide of commercial disasters. So it's obvious that he would be drawn to history's ultimate posthumous champion, Vincent Van Gogh. The opening scene cuts between an unkempt Vincent and an art auction years in the future where one of his paintings is going for millions. All I could think of were rentals of A Prairie Home Companion skyrocketing as I sat there.

Vincent & Theo seems a very small movie, playing very straight and nearly without gimmick which is funny since gimmicks always seemed to work for Altman. I wish they would make it into a sitcom like M*A*S*H - a show about two crazy brothers living in poverty, always at each other's throats: "Yo Theo, hollah back!" (I hope my flopping between sentimental and retarded is helping you read into my conflicted take on Altman.) It's interesting that Tim Roth, like Kirk Douglas, chooses to play VVG as the enfant terrible (unlike Martin Scorsese, who played him like Martin Scorsese), tearing up other artist's paintings, sketching a girl as she sits on the chamber pot and making a drunken spectable of himself like a turn-of-the-century Sid Vicious. He's good in the film, but to me the movie belongs to Paul Rhys as Theo who, for the sake of the story, begs the question: Is it better to be responsible and respected or to be passionate and talented? Because it's Altman, a key to the answer lies in their relationship with the ladies, and while it may seem slightly misogynistic to suggest the brothers' erratic behavior stems from less-than-romantic involvement with obnoxious women (it's even hinted at that Theo is impotent, or gay), the historical fact of Vincent's ear trimming does sort of vindicate the dismissal of such an accusation. The two best scenes are when the girl walks into the "living art" just after Theo has talked about walking into a painting and the "revolt of the sunflowers" sequence in which Vincent is overwhelmed by a field of his trademark muses. They stand up with Altman's best work. He's gone now but, like Van Gogh, left a lot behind.

11.21.06. The Witchfinder General.

aka The Conqueror Worm

Vincent Price (whose distinct voice I just realized sounds a little like David Lynch) plays Matthew Hopkins, an opportunistic witchfinder in 1645 who draws the vengeance of a soldier by defiling his fiance and hanging her uncle for an idolater.  In the tradition of all the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of the 1960s, Worm has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poe (Price does recite the title poem at the beginning and end of the movie.) Worm is great because it has everything: horror, action, romance. Vincent Price: a virulent plague, his evil is his influence on those around him.  A gruesome torture scene is followed by a thrilling gunfight. Directed by Michael Reeves, who famously died at 25, the movie is like a smaller The Devils, religious obsession and political perversion at its core, but also like an Errol Flynn swashbuckler.  In one great transition, a zoom into a rolling ocean wave transforms into a raging fire.  And like the best horror films, it ends with a soul-abandoning scream.  Some interesting tidbits care of Mr. Zombie: Price beat out Donald Pleasance for the part of Hopkins, and Reeves and Price almost came to blows on the set (Reeves apparently manipulated the performance out of his star.)

<<click here for 11/22/6 - 12/1/6>>

home    about   contact us    featured writings    years in review    film productions

All rights reserved The Pink Smoke  © 2008