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Starting October 1, a month’s worth of posts on 31 great horror films you should definitely see.

I have to admit, trapped in my own selfish world, I didn’t even know that Butch was ill, but, since June, he had been battling lung cancer, which finally took his life Friday. Half of the pair that made up the best movie duo ever to reach the screen, he and Robert Redford appeared only in two films, both by the same director (George Roy Hill) and both unbeatable…

No, I don’t even want to say the words, “RED Scarlet has been canceled”, but, in a note on the RED user boards, Jim Jannard, president of the company, posted a cryptic note: “We have changed everything about Scarlet because the market has changed and we have discovered a lot of things in the process. We have a new vision.” The RED Scarlet page on the site…

It was mid-June 1977 by the time the new sci-fi fantasy movie, “Star Wars” rolled into the small town where I grew up. I’d seen the TV ads (see video at the bottom of this post) and some Ralph McQuarrie pre-production art in Starlog magazine (bunch of stormtroopers standing around in a hallway). A horror and sci-fi fan from an early age, in 1977 what you had was Saturday morning TV, periodic “Planet of the Apes” marathons at the drive-in …

When “Taxi Driver” first came out in theatres in 1976, I remember seeing the ads on TV, and I remember my parents heading off to see it: the most talked-about film of the year. It didn’t really interest me at the time, although, for some reason it made me think of “Psycho” and I didn’t know why. Since then, I’ve seen “Taxi Driver” countless times, on home video, on DVD, in rep theatres. It’s just one of those films that hits me in the …

Before the age when all movies needed a deafening wall-to-wall music soundtrack, there were movies like “Dog Day Afternoon”, which, apart from the opening title track (”Amoreena” by Elton John) which fades into a car radio as the story begins, there isn’t a single note of music for the rest of the film. The story is left to the script, and the director and the performers. Based on the real-life story of John Wojtowicz, Al Pacino, who’d become …

Gregory McDonald, author of the “Fletch” series of books, died yesterday at his home in Tennessee. McDonald started his career as a journalist for the Boston Globe, then went on to fiction, penning the successful mystery series (”Fletch”, “Confess Fletch”, “Fletch’s Fortune”, etc.) which was later turned into a couple of films starring Chevy Chase.

His passing at this time is unfortunate, in the light of the possibility…

By this point, in the 1970’s, I was starting to get to the age where I could sneak into PG and R rated movies on my own, so a lot of my favorite films come from the 1974 - 1976 era. I guess, trying to cash in on the lines-around-the-block stir that “The Exorcist” caused only a couple of years before, Universal pulled out all the stops on the hype and tie-ins. I think I had every conceivable piece of shark paraphernalia, including several Doodle Art posters …

(via AICN) Very interesting article in Variety recently about some current troubles over at Fox and recent rocky returns, seems to explain a lot of questions — namely, what the heck “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” is doing as a summer release — and raises some gloomy exclamation points for the future (”Young X-Men” anyone?).

The article touches on the details behind some rumored problems on the…

If ever there was a movie in the history of movies that didn’t need a remake, it’s “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”. Despite this, a second remake is already underway. Let me clarify my position, once and for all: I don’t get the point of remakes. Sure, I can see how there can be some reward in doing an updated version, like if the original was a silent film, or if the filmmaker is adding something …