It

No doubt cashing in on the release of the theatrical version of this Stephen King blockbuster, the SPIKE network recently showed this four-hour made-for-TV version. The book was well over 1000 pages, and I couldn’t help wondering how the new movie was going to compress all that story into a little over two hours. The answer was simple: They didn’t. The book has two basic parts, following a ... Read more »

It Came From Beneath the Sea

I wish I had a “slimy” typeface to use here, because the title was shown with the letters IT dripping slime! (Actually I did find a font called “snot,” but I doubt it would show up in text.) This is the story of a giant radioactive octopus that terrorizes first the US Navy and then the whole San Francisco Bay Area, and it stars (in addition to Ray Harryhausen’s slimy giant octopus) Kenneth ... Read more »

It Came From Outer Space

It’s a little surprising, considering his reputation as the SF poet in his later years, how many really pulpish SF films Ray Bradbury was involved in as a younger man. Someone else is listed as the screenwriter here, but it’s said that pretty much all the dialogue is Ray’s. And it’s not bad dialogue, but what are you expecting out of a movie like this? It’s one of the smarter ones from ... Read more »

It follows

A horror movie that breaks new ground is always a welcome treat to me, standing out from the cookie-cutter gore-fests that are so popular. Recently there was Get Out, a truly frightening film. This is another. And though it opens with a pretty gruesome corpse, the rest of it is remarkably bloodless.

The idea is that there is this entity (never explained, ... Read more »

It Happened To Jane

I forget why I bought this when I came across it at Goodwill, where I buy 99% of my DVDs at $2.99 a pop (plus tax in WA, without tax in OR). Possibly it was the memory of high school days in the balcony of the Jefferson Theater in downtown Beaumont, Texas, where my girlfriend and I saw every movie Doris Day made in the early ‘60s. Maybe I thought nostalgia would make this better than it ... Read more »

It Happened Tomorrow

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

This would have made an excellent Twilight Zone episode … in fact, it may actually have been one. I certainly ... Read more »

It! The Terror From Beyond Space

Beyond space? I have no idea where that might be. I mean, space is pretty big. Whenever you get anywhere, there’s still a hell of a lot of it left.

But in this case the “Terror” comes from Mars, in the form of one of the cheesier monsters ever to haunt the drive-ins of the 1950s. (Not the cheesiest. That would have to be the one from Robot Monster, which ... Read more »

Italian For Beginners

We loved this movie. It concerns a group of Danes who meet weekly to learn Italian, and it concerns itself with the relationships that develop among them. Highly entertaining.

The Italian Job

Something quite rare here, a movie to which a sequel was made, and the sequel is pretty good. Not quite up to the standard this one set, but good in its own way. The newer version takes the physical concepts of an elaborate plan carried out by a large crew of experts and jazzes it up with newer technology, but largely misses on the humor of this one. Michael Caine is a criminal planner who ... Read more »

The Italian Job

Another re-make that works. How rare. I wouldn’t say it is as good as the original, things must be too complicated and too flashy these days, but there are two pretty good capers in it and I’m thankful for that.