Having grown rather disgruntled, last week, by the fact that the American Life Network has started inexplicably preempting everything (including beloved St. Elsewhere reruns) with irritating late night infomercials for thigh-press machines and hair conditioners, I eventually gave up and tuned into an animated short that I impulsively DVR’ed from the Sundance Channel, entitled Harvie Krumpet. And in the process, I discovered a minor miracle: a commendably offbeat, fresh, hysterically funny creation that was deservedly one of the breakout hits of the Sundance Film Festival six years ago (and won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short at the 2003 Oscars). Though only 23 minutes long, it has been released on North American DVD, supplemented by earlier shorts from the same director. It won me over instantly, and if you haven’t yet seen it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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34-years ago this weekend, Steven Spielberg’s unleashed his legendary oceanic horror outing to stunned audiences everywhere — so what better time than now to dive into some of its most notable B-movie ripoffs? This particular batch of retread cinema can be a funny crop of B-movie adventuring. While trolling any number of video chains, viewers are bound to find a surplus of cheap thrillers featuring killer fish and a cast that usually comes in the form of Lorenzo Lamas, Casper Van Dien, or Anthony Sabato Jr. While some of the modern forays into deep-water horror tend to reflect the “smart shark” conceit of Deep Blue Sea, it’s their forefathers in the shark cinema arena that present a more delectable plate of stolen ideas and shoddy FX work, all stemming from the big, bad granddaddy of ‘em all, Jaws.

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As I discussed at length in a January 2008 blog post concerning Stanley Jaffe’s 1983 thriller Without a Trace, one of the great logical conundrums of the mystery thriller from a screenwriter’s standpoint is how to end a missing persons tale without disappointing the audience. Refuse to provide an answer as to the vanished character’s whereabouts, and an audience feels cheated; offer a solution, and the motion picture loses an element of fascination, especially with repeat viewings. As a result, very few films in this subgenre feel particularly successful. Some, like the way-overhyped Bunny Lake is Missing, practically hand us the solution from the first scene, while others (Jonathan Mostow’s cruelly manipulative Breakdown or Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan, for instance) take a dramatic shift away from the central conceit to hand us something overblown and even ludicrous.

One immediate exception that leaps to mind is an extraordinary British thriller from 1950, directed by Anthony Darnborough and Terence Fisher and entitled So Long at the Fair.

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One of the most curious and interesting benefits of the ‘DVD Revolution’ is the ability to go back and re-watch decades-old series, years after they entered the public eye for the first time, thanks to their re-release on disc. But what of the outstanding network programs (and yes, there are a notorious few) that have either completely evaded digital reissue or that have only received a partial reissue, with no plans to expand beyond a Season One box set?

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As several of our editors have noted from time to time, Hollywood spent the past decade upping the ante on remakes to an absurd degree – from remakes of old television series, to remakes of old sci-fi vehicles, to remakes of remakes. God, how I’m sick of this creative bankruptcy. I’ve started asking myself point blank: “Does it ever end? And is anything sacred?” Apparently not where dollars are concerned. The elephantine re-do of The Day the Earth Stood Still was about the last straw for me; Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal were outstanding enough under Robert Wise’s brilliant direction, without my needing to see Keanu Reeves interact with a massive CG-animated robot (though that pairing is not too far off, come to think about it) in something vaguely posing as a re-creation. (Pity the Middle American 8-year-old boy who mistakes it for original material). Perhaps in desperation and certainly out of resentment, I went back to the basics last week – back into the annals of sci-fi to find an extinct species – the non-FX heavy, cerebral sci’fier. In this case: Val Guest’s brilliant, overlooked The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which I found for free on DVD at my library. It’s intelligent, it’s provocative, it’s scary as hell, it’s aimed primarily at adults, and this is one film I sure hope Hollywood is never myopic enough to remake, because special effects would ruin the impact here, moreso than in any other sci-fi film I can think of.

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As far as explosive action films are concerned, I will always retain a soft spot in my heart not only for the magnum-wielding, no-b.s. neo-fascist vigilante Dirty Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), but for the fourth installment of the Dirty Harry series: 1983’s Sudden Impact. This month marks the 25th anniversary of that opus, which reminds me of one of my most memorable film viewing experiences.

As a third-year student at Boston University, I decided to spend my spring semester of 1999 in the Sydney, Australia study and work abroad program, which led to the most miserable five-month period of my life.

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As Halloween Eve 2008 hits, I’m reminded of one of my own favorite pieces of cinematic horror – a film that shaped and defined my early adolescence so dramatically that it eventually took on iconic status for me: John Landis’s cult classic An American Werewolf in London. It’s been exactly 27 years since Polygram and Universal issued this horror comedy, and that all-too-narrow subgenre feels, in retrospect, rarely equaled. And rarely have we seen a horror film quite as eccentric or as offbeat (with its mostly British cast and location settings) emerge from a director as commercial as Landis under the thumb of a major Hollywood studio.

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Ah, fall. It’s a time of transition, crisp air, and distinctive colors; when we replace our cold lemonade and long, humid nights on the patio with hot cider, roaring fires, and violent deaths at the hands of cake obsessed corpses, vengeful totems, and a man eating lake creature resembling a poncho. I am speaking, of course, of the gruesome and markedly 1980s result of a collaboration between author Stephen King and filmmaker George A. Romero: Creepshow!

The first installment of this unlikely hit grossed $21 million domestically upon its release in 1982, and featured five short stories: “Father’s Day”, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”, “Something to Tide You Over”, “The Crate” and “They’re Creeping Up On You!”. While each story has its personal, if gruesome charms (not the least of which being the reanimated corpse of Nathan Grantham, whose incessant demands for cake drove his daughter Bedelia to bludgeoning him to death with an ashtray on Father’s Day), the standouts are “Something to Tide You Over”, in which a scorned, sadistic husband played with startling authenticity by Leslie Nielson plans a horrific death for his unfaithful wife and her lover, and They’re Creeping Up On You, featuring E.G. Marshall as a germ phobic businessman who finds himself up to his ears in cockroaches after a put upon employee had all he could take of his boss’s demands.

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