Cinefantastique Online

Retrospective articles take a look back on historical topics. Some are in-depth examinations of individual titles. Others are more general explorations of topical trends.

THE SILENT STAR (Der Schweigende Stern, a.k.a. FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS) is an oddball artifact of the year 1960: a science fiction film that echoes its 1950s predecessors while simultaneously foreshadowing the decade to come, the German-Polish co-production is poised somewhere on the cusp of the artistic and the absurd. Its ambition as serious cinefantastique [...]

Producer-director Bert I. Gordon is most well known for his low-budget 1950s science fiction pics like THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, EARTH VS. THE SPIDER, KING DINOSAUR, and ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE, but this little seen relic from 1960 is actually one of his better efforts. It is also one of the more entertaining installments of [...]

In the hot summer of 1960, one of the few places that had air conditioning in the small town where I lived was the local movie theater. That summer we went to the movies a lot. I can’t remember if it was during THE BELLBOY or THE ALAMO, but there was a preview for William [...]

1960 was a blood-red year for the vampire’s kith and kin, with over a half-dozen variations on the theme: some old school, some modern; some ugly, some sexy; some classic, some camp. In short, there such a rich diversity of undead revenants and blood-drinking monsters that it is hard to generalize; you have to take each on on its own terms. Here then is a Photographic Retrospective of the Vampires of 1960.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is an eccentric horror-comedy whose very premise almost single-handedly guarantees cult status: it’s  about a goofy guy who becomes a homicidal outlaw after accidentally cross-breeding a carnivorous plant that not only craves humans for food but also talks, demanding in a ridiculously insistent voice: “Feed me! Feed meeeeeeee.”). The concept is [...]

No new genre films hit theatres this weekend, but fear not: Dan Persons, Lawrence French, and Steve Biodrowski once again rev of the time machine and take you five decades into the past, for a look at one of the greatest horror films of all time, director Mario Bava’s masterpiece of black-and-white Gothic horror, BLACK [...]

The word peplum derives from the Roman word for pleated skirt, and a “peplum movie” is one in which the characters wear such skirts. SON OF SAMSON (originally Maciste nella Valle dei Re [“Maciste in the Valley of the Kings”]) was the second of Mark Forest’s muscleman movies (his first was GOLIATH AND THE DRAGON) [...]

Covered in phony fins, this monitor lizard is suspended by wires to give it an upright posture in THE LOST WORLD (1960)
1960 was not necessarily the Year of the Dinosaur, but it did feature a pair of science fiction films that clearly delineate two different approaches Hollywood used during this era to portray the ravenous reptiles on [...]

Originally created to be a co-feature for BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER, THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN is the Rodney Dangerfield of low-budget Invisible Man movies: it gets no respect, even though it’s really not a bad little effort.
Like BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER, THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN was produced by Miller Consolidated Pictures, directed by cult director Edgar Ulmer, [...]

BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER is a low-budget, science fiction epic-adventure-wanna-be ultimately sabotaged by Arthur C. Pierce’s weak screenplay. According to To “B” Or Not to “B” by Robert Clarke & Tom Weaver, the project came about when actor-producer Robert Clarke optioned a script by Arthur C. Pierce, which Clarke planned to produce through a deal withMiller [...]

With theatres offering no new genre films this weekend, The Cinefantastique Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Podcast turns  its all-seeing gaze back through the mists of time a 50th anniversary ocular examination of EYES WITHOUT A FACE, director George Franju’s moody masterpiece of art house horror. Imagine a beautiful dream of lyrical black-and-white images, of [...]

David Pirie in his excellent book A Heritage of Horror identified a new kind of horror film that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, namely the Sadian horror film, so-called because it was suggested that they would appeal to sadists only. The initial titles in this trend were HORRORS OF THE BLACK [...]

For those looking for a quality sword & sandal movie, they better look elsewhere than GOLIATH AND THE DRAGON, but for those who take a guilty pleasure in silly dialogue and ratty-looking fantasy monsters, this movie is bad movie gold.
After the unexpectedly enormous success of Embassy Pictures’ import of HERCULES, American International Pictures shopped around [...]