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2 articles from 2009

1 May 2009 12:31 AM, PDT | Alternative Film Guide | See recent Alternative Film Guide news »

Joseph L. Mankiewicz Centennial - Part I And if Guys and Dolls (1955) was a bore — just about everyone in this film musical is miscast, from Brando to Mankiewicz himself — the director recovered his touch with the adult (and bizarre) Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), a psychotic psychological drama adapted by Gore Vidal and (officially) Tennessee Williams from Williams’s own play. (Williams later said he had nothing to do with the film version.) The story follows a young woman (Elizabeth Taylor) who is sent to a psychiatric hospital after she suffers a nervous breakdown following some horrific traumatic experience. Things can get quite heady — bad pun intended — when you mix traditional Southern gentility and propriety with sexual desire, incest, homosexuality, psychoanalysis, lobotomy, cannibalism, and Mercedes McCambridge in one single film made at a time when most of those issues couldn’t be discussed, let alone be shown on screen. Not to [...] »

- Andre Soares

2 January 2009 7:06 AM, PST | Fangoria | See recent Fangoria news »

“I didn’t know how to act,” Bobbie Bresee says of her first big-screen performance on the audio commentary for the film in question, Mausoleum. The assertion is hard to contest, but it’s also inarguable that her recollections of this 1983 schlocker are by far the best part of Bci Eclipse's double-feature disc.

The starring turn by former Playboy Bunny Bresee is far from the only problem with Mausoleum; this is the kind of movie in which the story centers on a clan named Nomed and acts like the audience can’t figure that one out right away, and in which another character knows of their history from a book helpfully titled The Nomed Family. Susan Farrell (Bresee), who once had a frightening encounter in the Nomed crypt when she was a young girl (as played by Julie Christy Murray, daughter of the film’s lighting designer, who looks nothing »

2 articles from 2009