Have You Ever Seen

Betty Field, Priscilla Lane and Theda Bara are 3 more AFI Old-Timey Actresses who get crossed off the list with this episode of Blues In The Night and A Fool There Was. In Blues, the women directed by Anatole Litvak are polar opposites. Field is a goody-two-shoes…and part of a band led by the troubled Richard Whorf. Lane is the bad girl he falls hard for, while the cast plays the blues and/or does crime (and things get deadly) in a bar in Jersey. Then Bara gets to vamp it up in Frank Powell's 1915 silent flick as a succubus who latches onto dumb men (like Edward Jose) and sucks them dry of everything they have. Money, will to live, all of it. So plop this one about Blues In The Night and A Fool There Was into your device as I throw episode #773 your way.
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After talking about 9 scary movies in October, comedy kicks off November on Have You Ever Seen with Three Amigos. John Landis' joke-packed western has Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short playing faded movie stars who are hired to save a Mexican village from vicious (and rather dumb) bandits. Unlike the classics this was riffing on (Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven), these dopes are in way over their head. They're not gunslingers. They're dopey actors who intimidate no one when cameras aren't rolling on their same-old, same-old. There are too many funny highlights to mention, so doff your sombrero, thrust out your crutch and do the Three Amigos salute as you cue up my 772nd episode.
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Neil Marshall might surpass The Descent one day, but his second movie is his magnum opus. And it's an outstanding aural and visual experience. The authenticity of his 6 spelunking women and a bunch of stuntmen playing hostile creatures who live in underground caves and hunt humans help make this set-bound production feel oh so real. But what IS real, what's not...and just how feral does Sarah actually get? Shauna Macdonald is very good as the emotionally-shattered-yet-ferocious Sarah, while Natalie Mendoza is as cool as she is stunning playing the tough, reckless and dishonest Juno. The Descent has one of the most effective jump scares in modern horror (or in EVER horror), but Marshall has several other big jolts in store too...not to mention the bleakest of bleak endings. Yes, The Descent is another intense movie in Scary Movie Month, complete with copious gore, violence, feats of derring-do...and constant fear. Episode #771 is a right corker...and don't forget to stay tuned for "So I Got Thinkin'."
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The 8th of 9 films on this channel in Scary Movie Month is a B&W sci-fi-thriller directed by…well, was it Christian Nyby or was it his producer Howard Hawks? Whoever led Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, Margaret Sheridan and James Arness through their paces did a solid-enough job. There's paranoia in The Thing From Another World, but John Carpenter's 1982 take on the material is just far superior...partly because it does paranoia and isolation so much better. The original DOES have an infamous jump scare with the alien, plus there IS tension and uncertainty throughout. When WILL the veggie vampire come looking for blood? So put on warm clothes and remember to look up from time to time as we go up to the North Pole and I gab about The Thing From Another World in episode #770.
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Before Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino teamed up in From Dusk Till Dawn to make a macho gangster-comedy that turns into a vampire-action film. It wasn't what people were expecting from these 2, but the friends pulled off a violent, bloody, slick, nasty and often tacky fangs flick. George Clooney's progression from TV star to movie star was helped in large part by working so well here with Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, Salma Hayek, writer/irritating actor Tarantino and director Rodriguez. And how about that scene-stealing Cheech Marin! After that review, I spent 20 minutes rattling off facts & figures and doling out some personal feelings about many of the greatest vampire movies. The Draculas, the Nosferatus, the Sinners, the etc. So everybody be cool in an ancient strip club as episode #769 delves into From Dusk Till Dawn.
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