The wealthy Haloran clan meet at the family estate for their annual remembrance of young Kathleen, who drowned some fifteen years earlier. Lead by matriarch Gloria Haloran (Julia Campanelli), she uses this reunion to let her children and their spouses know that she is about to donate the family fortune to charity. This does not sit well with the kids. Gloria spends a lot of time having one-sided conversations with an unseen Kathleen and it doesn't take a Ghostbuster to notice

Did you know that there is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel that was completed but never released? Did you know it is a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 and the focus is on the Chop Top character? Did you know that Bill Moseley actually reprised his role of Chop Top for scenes to keep the continuity between the two films? Did you know it was directed by Hooper's son, William Tony Hooper, and his dad was on set a couple times and even worked on the

The Honeymooners classic 39 television episodes and how they changed cinema production forever. Or, George takes a trip down another rabbit hole to explain one of the most common pieces of equipment on a film set. By George Seminara In 1928, C. Francis Jenkins opened the very first television station in the U.S., W3XK, which went live on July 2 from the Jenkins Labs in Washington and then sometime in 1929 from the Jenkins Studios in beautiful downtown Wheaton, Maryland. In 19

I think we have all watched a movie and by the film's end we ask the TV, "What the hell was that?" Howard Goldberg's Apple Pie is a film that you start asking that question about fifteen minutes in and never stop. We meet gangster Jacques "The Ace" Blinbaum (Tony Azito), who enters an apartment building with his entourage. Maybe. Maybe it's an apartment building, maybe it's a hotel. They look the same to me. And maybe Jacques is a gangster. He comes across as a gangster type

On December 29, 2022, Ruggero Deodato passed away in Italy at age 83. That was a damn good run. He is known by film fans as a horror director and is affectionately referred to as the "Cannibal Man" by some. I never knew much about Deodato. I was aware of his filmography, but he was never a director I sought out. Obviously, he is most famous for Cannibal Holocaust (1980), a powerful piece of filmmaking. It is not a film for which I have great affection. (I'll admit it, for as

The story begins and we see a hitch-hiker getting into a car, only to witness the hitch-hiker later dumping the body of the driver and taking off in the stolen car. Two men, Roy Collins (O'Brien) and Gil Bowen (Lovejoy), are on a hunting trip that takes them down to Mexico. It's uncertain what the boys are hunting for, as we see them cruising through a neon lit Mexican town full of dancing senoritas and dive bars. When they come upon a man broken down on the side of the road

As we come to films and discover films and grow to love films, many, many influences assist us in our journey. For horror fans my age, it means something to say that you grew up on the "Bob Martin era Fangoria." Other fans know what that means. "I grew up watching movies that Joe Bob Briggs or The Phantom of the Movies reviewed in their column." That means something. "Siskel and Ebert really piss me off- they don't "get" slasher movies." That means something. "I saw the crazi

Clara Bow A little something about the ladies. The girls. The women. Let's start the new year with a little female-centric history lesson. I'm not an expert, expert. I'm a movie fan with a lot of books. Luckily, I grew up in a time of dollar movie theaters that showed double features galore. Classic films that were often paired thematically or by the star. Yes, like fine wine and cheese. I was also taught by two remarkable men, William K. Everson and Al Kilgore, in film schoo

Documentaries come in all shapes and sizes, and the best are the ones that divide the action between re-enactments of the subject at hand and the talking heads offering their different opinions. The Pez Outlaw straddles that line beautifully and delivers a intricately detailed heist picture amid the fact-spewing players. In the 1990's, before the World Wide Web, the world seemed like a bigger place. Frustrated machinist Steve Glew discovered the world of Pez collecting. (For

Dead Lives Matter (2022) By John A. Russo Detective Andrew Brown is after rapist/killer Roger Dowman, who escaped capture only to find Brown's daughter and murder her. Dowman's eventually put down, but when a couple of screwballs go to retrieve stolen loot from the Evans City Cemetery, Dowman and his army of the dead rise and tear hell out of the living. This new "living dead" novel by John A. Russo moves at a quick clip and basically abandons any he-hawing for in-your-face z