THE SEDUCTRESS (1981)

In 1981, a motion picture was released in which a woman is being utilized by a sleazy photographer with dark contacts in the aid of a shadowy political plot meant to clear the road for further malfeasance and corruption. While this sounds like I’m describing Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, I’m actually talking about Bob […]

SHADOWS (1959)

John Cassavetes’s Shadows is a vibrant, energetic, and sometimes bittersweet story of a tight-knit family of African-Americans during the live-wire era of the late 1950’s when coffee shops and poetry readings were fostering the minds of the disaffected and restless young folks of the Silent Generation. Known now as the filmmaking debut of actor-turned-director Cassavetes, […]

MEATBALLS (1979)

“You make one good friend a summer and you’re doing pretty well.” You wouldn’t know it today by how little it’s discussed but, believe it or not, there was a time in which Meatballs seemed to be playing all the time and was completely ubiquitous in the experience of a kid cresting ten in the […]

EUROPE IN THE RAW (1963)

Not quite nude enough to satisfy nudie-cutie enthusiasts and just a shade too blue to work as a light documentary on the finer tourist spots in Europe, I’m not entirely sure how one could successfully classify Russ Meyer’s 1963 oddity, Europe in the Raw. Conventional wisdom states that it is one of Meyer’s most trifling […]

FANNY HILL (1964)

It is by mere coincidence that, in another series of career overviews of filmmakers who have meant a great deal to me over the years, I recently watched and wrote about L.A. Takedown, Michael Mann’s 1989 made-for-television movie that was his first attempt to bring his screenplay for Heat to general audiences. In that piece, […]

A WOMAN’S TORMENT (1977)

Sex is a loveless, one-way street in A Woman’s Torment, a particularly effective, dark, and creepy hardcore horror hybrid from writer/director/producer/cinematographer Roberta Findlay (credited here as Robert W. Norman). On one hand, it’s the tale of Karen (Tara Chung), a woman touched by a kind of homicidal hyper-sexuality. On the other, it’s a movie that […]

HEAVENLY BODIES (1963)

As Russ Meyer stumbled to the finish line of the nudie cutie craze, it was apparent that he was a filmmaker of commanding energy and imagination that had run through the proverbial store and exhausted it of its contents. 1963’s Heavenly Bodies, his last true nudie cutie, is indicative of both conceits. For Heavenly Bodies […]

WILD GALS OF THE NAKED WEST (1962)

Russ Meyer had a true ebb and flow when it came to his nudie cuties. For every advance forward, there was a trepidation followed by a slight retreat. Eve and the Handyman improved on The Immoral Mr. Teas in a fundamental way by ditching the multitude of women in favor of one central female character. […]

EROTICA (1961)

One of the drawbacks of the nudie-cutie film is that there are just so many interesting ways to show nudity for nudity’s sake for the sixty minutes that made up the average length of the movies. Most of the time, as was the case with The Immoral Mr. Teas and Eve and the Handyman, the […]

EVE AND THE HANDYMAN (1961)

Russ Meyer had to take incremental steps to get to become the storied and respected filmmaker that he eventually did. His first step was being a gifted photographer who was as adept at his skill as mortars and debris rained down around him in the heat of battle as he was while studying the contours […]