Films

Posts about movie, actors, and film in general

Hitchcock podcast in the final stretch

Well, we’re almost there. Way back in April 2009, Jim McDevitt and I started podcasting about Alfred Hitchcock. This should come as no surprise. We’re the coauthors of an awesome book, A Year of Hitchcock, which is, like, pretty good and stuff. The book was a serious but accessible look at the full body of work of legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. I like it. I hope you get it and like it, too. (Honestly, at this point I assume you all follow us on Facebook, anyway.) To accompany the book, we decided to do a series of light-hearted, casual podcasts that followed the book chapter-for-chapter, and sometimes veered off into interview shows, topical shows, and so on. To be honest, we started off kind of…
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The Year of Hitchcock podcast is back!

After a long, fatigue-driven hiatus, Jim McDevitt and I finally got back behind the microphone two weekends ago and recorded all-new episodes of The Year of Hitchcock Podcast. We’re excited to say that we recorded enough episodes to release them every two weeks for the next few months. We’ll be discussing landmark films like Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, and The Man Who Knew Too Much during this stretch of episodes. We initially began doing the podcast as a weekly companion to our book, A Year of Hitchcock (which will soon be available in softcover at a much lower price). Whereas the book is approachable but serious, accessible to casual fans but also worthwhile for Hitchcock aficionados, the podcasts quickly became looser, more casual, more irreverent,…
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A midnight visit from the Vampyr

Surprise! It’s midnight on Halloween. You thought my week o’ public domain horror films was over with Night of the Living Dead. You were wrong. Director Carl Dreyer directed one of the great films of all time, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I once called “a blessing to the world of cinema.” Four years later he would direct Vampyr, a ghostly, ostentatious, bold, experimental film. It’s dark and slow and brooding and moody and forgoes an engrossing story in exchange for an engrossing atmosphere. Twilight this ain’t. Happy midnight. Enjoy the film. (I’ve changed the embedded video to links so this page loads faster): Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Read more about…
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Night of the Living Dead!

For Halloween, I thought I’d go with the big daddy. One of the kings of them all. Grandfather of one of the most popular subgenres of horror today. I’m talking, of course, about George Romero’s classic, Night of the Living Dead. Now THIS is a legendary film. When it comes to modern zombies, it’s the one that started it all. And it’s still fantastic. It also happens to be in the public domain (see below), so for this Halloween take a gander back at a flick you probably haven’t seen in a while: Some things to note: * When I spoke to Russell Streiner (Billy) several years ago for a feature on the 2005 Fangoria convention, he told me the movie doesn’t hold up just…
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The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962)

We’ll cap off this Halloween season foray into public domain horror films tomorrow with the biggest classic of the classics, but for now let’s just have fun with the schlocky B-movie fun of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, a 1962 flick about a doctor who keeps his girlfriend’s decapitated head alive and goes in search of a body to attach it to. Two of the characters in this movie are billed as “Blonde Stripper” and “Brunet Stripper,” so you know this is good cinema. Oh yeah. It’s in the public domain, so check it out: The movie is freely and legally available for download here, though I can’t vouch for the quality.