Mad Max itself was an homage to Westerns, so yeah, it did have plenty of antecedents.
Classic low-budget science-fiction, fantasy & horror films that you like?
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Mad Max itself was an homage to Westerns, so yeah, it did have plenty of antecedents.
The whole premise of Mad Max was that it was a dystopian future/Western frontier movie.
I didn't realize they were referencing anything beyond werewolves in that one.
This might be of interest to the people in this thread. Entertainment Weekly has posted an excerpt from The Lady From the Black Lagoon, a new non-fiction book coming out all about Milicent Patrick, who was one of Disney's first female animators and the creator of The Creature From the Black Lagoon. I had no idea the creature was designed by a woman, that's pretty cool, especially for that era.
The Man from Earth was fantastic. The entire movie is a conversation in a living room, and it freakin' rocks.
Starship Invasions
Star Crash
The Shape of Things to Come
They Live
Battle Beyond the Stars
Star Crash
The Shape of Things to Come
They Live
Battle Beyond the Stars
YES!
Oh, and Timerider!
^^^
Seriously - The WORST Italian sci-fi film ever made. I have never been able to sit through the entire thing.
Oh yeah? well I'll see your "Star Crash" and raise you 2+5 Missione Hydra!^^^
Seriously - The WORST Italian sci-fi film ever made. I have never been able to sit through the entire thing.
George Romero is probably my favorite low-budget genre filmmaker. His movies had a "let's make a movie" charm that was only outmatched by their sheer ambitiousness. While most low budget horror directors would settle for something realistically affordable on a shoestring budget (say a slasher movie filmed on streets and in a couple homes or a found-footage movie where the monster is heard but seldom seen if seen at all), Romero was intent on making horror epics. They were community theater on an massive scale.
Actors were usually family, friends or struggling actors that hung out or worked at the bar his wife Christine worked at. Extras were family, friends or people that came out just to be in a Romero movie. The audio commentaries are a hoot. It's not uncommon to hear "There's your father!" or "My barber owned a motorcycle, so I put him in the movie."
Shot inside real homes, shopping malls, apartment buildings, businesses, TV stations, trains, abandoned missile silos and underground caverns used to store things for the wealthy and the government. Soldiers were sometimes played by real soldiers that brought along their actual heavy artillery. Biker gangs were played by real biker gangs. Want some helicopters and semi-trucks? You got your helicopters and semi-trucks. The entire community would come together to help make these ambitious productions a reality. All of this gave Romero's movies a remarkable sense of realism despite their fantastical premises.
One of the things I love most about Romero is how much of a cinematic chameleon he was. If you didn't know any better you'd swear that Night of the Living Dead (an homage to and inversion of the '50s drive-in monster movie and its tropes), Martin (a Scorsese-style mostly plotless character study), Dawn of the Dead (an exploitation action/adventure romp) and Day of the Dead (a claustrophobic Kubrickian chamber piece about the loss of humanity at the end of the world) were made by four completely different filmmakers.
Also, it was gusty as hell to make a horror movie centered around both a woman and an interracial gay couple (John and Bill were certainly coded gay) in 1985. And while Dawn famously tackled consumerism, Day tackled toxic masculinity twenty years before there was even a word for it. He really doesn't get enough credit for that.
Night of the Living Dead (1968) Budget: $114,000
Martin (1978) Budget: $250,000
Dawn of the Dead (1979) Budget: $1.5 million
Day of the Dead (1985) Budget: $3.5 million
Actors were usually family, friends or struggling actors that hung out or worked at the bar his wife Christine worked at. Extras were family, friends or people that came out just to be in a Romero movie. The audio commentaries are a hoot. It's not uncommon to hear "There's your father!" or "My barber owned a motorcycle, so I put him in the movie."
Shot inside real homes, shopping malls, apartment buildings, businesses, TV stations, trains, abandoned missile silos and underground caverns used to store things for the wealthy and the government. Soldiers were sometimes played by real soldiers that brought along their actual heavy artillery. Biker gangs were played by real biker gangs. Want some helicopters and semi-trucks? You got your helicopters and semi-trucks. The entire community would come together to help make these ambitious productions a reality. All of this gave Romero's movies a remarkable sense of realism despite their fantastical premises.
One of the things I love most about Romero is how much of a cinematic chameleon he was. If you didn't know any better you'd swear that Night of the Living Dead (an homage to and inversion of the '50s drive-in monster movie and its tropes), Martin (a Scorsese-style mostly plotless character study), Dawn of the Dead (an exploitation action/adventure romp) and Day of the Dead (a claustrophobic Kubrickian chamber piece about the loss of humanity at the end of the world) were made by four completely different filmmakers.
Also, it was gusty as hell to make a horror movie centered around both a woman and an interracial gay couple (John and Bill were certainly coded gay) in 1985. And while Dawn famously tackled consumerism, Day tackled toxic masculinity twenty years before there was even a word for it. He really doesn't get enough credit for that.
Night of the Living Dead (1968) Budget: $114,000
Martin (1978) Budget: $250,000
Dawn of the Dead (1979) Budget: $1.5 million
Day of the Dead (1985) Budget: $3.5 million
Romero was a genius.
The word may not have existed back then, but the concept did. In the '70s, there was this whole big thing about "men's lib," the idea that men didn't have to be shackled to old ideas of being tough and hard and angry, but could embrace their gentler, more feminine side and be openly caring, emotional, and vulnerable. The exemplar for this new masculinity was Alan Alda as Hawkeye on M*A*S*H, a character who started out as a glib womanizer but evolved into a deeply caring and sensitive and woman-respecting guy as Alda's personality shaped the character. You also had other empathetic, enlightened male leads like Hal Linden as Barney Miller or Bill Bixby as David Banner on The Incredible Hulk. This was the image of masculinity that shaped me as a preteen, that taught me that there was nothing unmanly about being gentle and sensitive, that tough guys and macho boors were a relic of a dying, backward worldview.
But then there was a weird reversal in the '80s, with a new surge of machismo-driven action heroes like Rambo or Chuck Norris, along with a surge of deeply misogynistic R-rated comedy, fantasy, and horror movies. Somehow, the idea of enlightened, sensitive manhood receded and the idea that men had to be tough, unfeeling, warlike, and dominating to women came back. I was disturbed by that trend at the time, but that mentality has somehow gotten far worse in the generation since.
EDIT: Either by coincidence or because my browser is spying on me, its article-recommendation feature just showed me an essay about the '70s "mens' lib" movement and how it went wrong: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/eve7zk/the-mens-liberation-movement-time-forgot Although it leaves out any mention of the sensitive-male TV role models I grew up with and paints the movement as a short-lived aberration, so I don't think it's the whole story.
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He’s not perfect, but I have a huge soft-spot for Roger Corman. And the Poe stuff he personally directed was usually genuinely good. Pit and the Pendulum, and House of Usher are probably the stand outs.
He also produced all the Death Race movies, and they’re fun schlock. X: Man with the X-ray eyes has a great ending, and there’s stuff like Battle Beyond the Stars.
He also produced all the Death Race movies, and they’re fun schlock. X: Man with the X-ray eyes has a great ending, and there’s stuff like Battle Beyond the Stars.
Same here. I also loved QUINCY, as Jack Klugman's character was like Pierce in many ways
It is good that we saw caring men in the 1970s--and yet many want their husbands to be "take charge" at the same time
“Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.”
― Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
I want that CAR.
A guilty pleasure of mine is the Amando de Ossorio movie Tombs of the Blind Dead .
http://www.thevideograveyard.com/t/tombsofblinddead.html
On the surface, it often seems painfully dated. Nevertheless, the film gets under my skin for a variety of reasons, chief among them the sinister score by renowned composer Antón García Abril. Abril's acclaimed soundtrack is a revelation, avoiding the musical clichés of the era in favor of an atonal, droning mélange of piano, percussion and organ, topped off with spine-chilling Gregorian-style chanting and random shrieks and groans. It's deeply unsettling to say the least, and it cloaks the film in a suffocating, unearthly atmosphere....The Templars actually ride (dead) horses in pursuit of their prey, but de Ossorio films these scenes in slow motion, making it seem like time itself is being warped by the supernatural influence of the dead knights. (Peter Jackson had to have been influenced by these scenes when he filmed the Ringwraiths' pursuit of Arwen in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.) I also can't say enough about the decrepit monastery of Cercon outside of Madrid, which stands in for the fictional location of Berzano in the film. This has to be, hands down, one of the creepiest movie locations ever. It's almost a character unto itself, and it lends incredible production value to the film.
http://filmiliarity.blogspot.com/2012/10/final-girls-shocktober-tombs-of-blind.html
La endemoniada (Demon Witch Child) is one of the better Exorcist knock-offs
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I have mixed feelings about Quincy. Jack Klugman was a fantastic actor, heartfelt and soulful, and always fun to listen to when Quincy gave an impassioned speech. On the other hand, the show drifted away from its mystery-of-the-week format and became an incredibly preachy social-activism show. Even though I agreed with the values it was preaching, I felt it got so heavy-handed about its messages that it lost sight of being entertaining.
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