Month: February 2020

Moviedrome Mondays: The Honeymoon Killers (1970)

by John Charet

Since I could not find a youtube video link of Moviedrome presenter Alex Cox’s introduction to one-time director Leonard Kastle’s once rarely shown 1970 lovers-on-the-lam cult item The Honeymoon Killers, readers will have to rely on the transcript (read here). The episode’s original airdate was July 1, 1990 (read here). Along with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead from two years earlier, The Honeymoon Killers has often been cited (and deservingly so) as a genuine cult classic. Shot on a low-budget with black-and-white cinematography that resembles a style similar to that of a documentary, the film’s disturbing true-life subject matter and it’s unglamorous depiction of it (loosely based or otherwise) would arguably influence equally masterful later day entries like director John McNaughton’s 1986 (though first released in 1990) serial killer masterpiece Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Trivia:  this serves as the only film that Kastle ever directed and it also reportedly served as French New Wave filmmaker Francois Truffaut’s “favorite American film” (read here).

Here is a youtube video link to the film’s original theatrical trailer

Advertisement

Moviedrome Mondays: The Terminator (1984)

by John Charet

Sorry for posting this a day late – family emergency. I have posted a youtube video link below to Moviedrome presenter Alex Cox’s introduction to director James Cameron’s 1984 seminal sci-fi action classic The Terminator. My readers can also read his transcript here. The episode’s original airdate was June 24, 1990 (read here). Once again, there is nothing more I can add that has already been said about this timeless cinematic gem – except that I personally prefer it to the bigger-budgeted 1991 sequel, which was Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As much as I greatly admire the latter, the earlier film is so tightly executed in every single way that it can’t help but feel subtly unique at the same time. When all is said and done, it makes Terminator 2: Judgment Day (even with all of it’s spectacular special effects) look conventional by comparison.

Here is a youtube video link to Alex Cox’s Moviedrome intro to The Terminator

Here is a youtube video link to one of it’s two theatrical trailers

Here is a youtube video link to the second of it’s two trailers

Moviedrome Mondays: Dead of Night (1945)

by John Charet

Once again, I could not find a youtube video link of Moviedrome presenter Alex Cox introducing Ealing’s 1945 British anthology horror classic Dead of Night, so readers will have to rely on the transcript (read here). The episode’s original airdate was June 10, 1990 (read here). I agree with everything Cox has said about this masterpiece of horror especially the ventriloquist segment.

Since I could not find a good trailer for it online, do various research on it because it is genuinely frightening.

Moviedrome Mondays: Goin’ South (1978)

by John Charet

Since I could not find a youtube video link of Moviedrome presenter Alex Cox introducing director/star Jack Nicholson’s 1978 curio western comedy Goin’ South, readers will have to rely on a transcript of his introduction instead (read here). The episode’s original airdate was May 27, 1990 (read here). Goin’ South was Nicholson’s second film as a director – seven years after his previous film Drive, He Said and 12 years before The Two Jakes (a sequel to Chinatown). The third title was very good, but as with Drive, He Said, Goin’ South are little more than good. Make no mistake, this is not a bad film, but as a comedy, it is only half as funny as it should be and as a 70’s western, it lacks everything that made both The Hired Hand and The Missouri Breaks so poetic (like the former) or deeply fascinating (like the latter). I agree with everything Cox says about it, especially how it pales in comparison to the latter from two years earlier in 1976 (read here).

I can’t really seem to find a theatrical trailer to it so I am afraid you dear readers will have to read it’s wikipedia or watch youtube clips of it.