Author Archive: Retro

Dir. Roger Corman. Cult favorite Dick Miller stars as a sculptor who seems to bring make life-like plaster cats and people. Another Corman quickie made in 2 days.

Dir. Ed Wood. Classic bad film. Film noir Ed Wood style. First screen appearance of the legendary muscle man Steve Reeves, who was later immortalized in the “Hercules” pictures.

A russian scientist is chased into a nuclear testing area and has the misfortune of experiencing an atomic bomb explosion. Now, club-wielding monster, he strangles a lot of people. Supposedly a nuclear protest film. Excellent cinematography.

Wood’s most autobiographical film, he stars under a pseudonym in this “docu-drama” about transvestites and sex-change operations. Will his fiance let him wear her angola sweater? See daffy dream sequences, Bela Lugosi as a scientist-narrator and a heartfelt plea for understanding towards men who wear “pink satin undies.” Glen or Glenda?” is a bad movie lover’s dream. Hilarious dialogue, no coherent plotline, and many memorable sequences of transvestites and their hardships.

A reporter who has had an affair with the daughter of the U.S. President is sent to Hungary. There he is bitten by a werewolf, and then gets transferred back to Washington, where he gets a job as press assistant to the President. Then bodies start turning up in D.C. . . .

Dir. Sam Newfield. All-midget cast western. You haven’t seen a true chase scene until you see a group of guys chasing each other on Shetland ponies.

Unusual western that’s a lot of fun contains many stars who were munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz”. Produced by Jed Buell. Dir. Sam Newfield.

Big city mobsters capitalize on civil unrest by setting up a profit-oriented, secret society based on religious and racial intolerance. Dir. Victor Halperin

A young girl gets involved with a crowd that smokes marijuana, drinks and has sex. She winds up an alcoholic, pregnant drug addict and is forced to get an abortion.

The conjoined twins Violet Hilton and Daisy Hilton, also seen in Tod Browning’s classic Freaks and the smarmy Slash of the Knife, star in this interesting melodrama about love, betrayal, and murder. They play Vivian and Dotty Hamilton, joined-at-the-spine singers in a vaudeville show managed by the unscrupulous Ted Hinckley (Allen Jenkins). Hinckley pays a sharpshooter named Andre Pariseau 100 dollars a week to date Dotty as a publicity stunt. When the pair are married, Dotty’s desire to be surgically separated from her sister leads the panicked Violet to shoot Pariseau dead, and she stands trial (with Dotty, naturally) for murder. Despite the exploitative ad campaign, this is a well-done melodrama presenting a realistic (?) situation in an engaging way. Viewers may still get the feeling that they might go to Hell for watching it, but at least it avoids the sleazy implications of Slash of the Knife. The British-born Hilton sisters were exploited in [...]