Cinefantastique Online

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With no new horror, fantasy, or science fiction films opening this weekend, Cinefantastique stalwarts Lawrence French and Steve Biodrowski keep their Sense of Wonder alive by turning the clock back five decades for a retrospective celebration of TALES OF TERROR (1962), producer-director Roger Corman’s fourth film inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. With [...]

Image Entertainment’s new 14-DVD set of 67 episodes of THRILLER is quite a marvelous treat, and it fits in perfectly with Cinefantastique’s celebration of  movies released in that seminal year for terror, 1960.
Among the impressive authors who wrote episodes for THRILLER were Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Donald S. Sandford and Barre Lyndon.  The [...]

This triptych of tales set in the titular city of Tokyo suggests an Eastern version of NEW YORK STORIES, but there is a significant difference: in this case, none of the three writer-directors (two French and one Korean) are natives; consequently, their short films emerge less as love letters to the city than as skewed [...]

This dismal direct-to-video anthology of nine short subjects is almost guaranteed to provoke howls of outrage from disappointed viewers demanding their money back. The low-budget production values show a certain technical competence, suggesting reasonably well-made student films, but the stories are so flimsy and the pay-offs so weak your reaction is less likely to be [...]

By Steve Biodrowski
This may be the ultimate piece of horror nerd nostalgia cinema, a movie loaded with trivial tidbits that serve as talking points for confirmed geeks while the vast majority of the viewers remain absolutely clueless. Produced and scripted by Dennis Bartok (who used to program the schedule for the American Cinematheque in Hollywood), [...]

THREE…EXTREMES is an anthology by three different directors: one Chinese, one Korean, one Japanese. All the episodes are interesting and disturbing – perhaps too much so, without any clear reason for the audience to endure the suffering. Despite the Asian pedigree, none of the episodes is in the mode of recent terrors from the Far [...]

This is a colorful but ultimately weak attempt by United Artists to cash in on American International’s Poe series by adapting three Nathaniel Hawthorne stories into a TALES OF TERROR anthology format. As in Roger Corman’s 1963 film, TWICE TOLD TALES (released later the same year) features Price in three starring roles, one for each episode. Price plays Alex [...]

Producer-director Roger Corman’s fourth Poe film (the third starring Vincent Price) benefits greatly from the anthology format, which allows Edgar Allan’s Poe’s stories to reach the screen with relatively less embellishment; consequently, the strengths of the previous films (atmospheric camerawork and production design) are retained, while the weaknesses (limited settings and padded stories) are overshadowed. [...]