Showing posts sorted by date for query tuesday's overlooked films. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query tuesday's overlooked films. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

the "Lost and Newly Recovered" Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: 11 October 2017

From The Lady From Chungking

Alice Chang:  "NC, Esq." on TitanicDark Souls 3

A. J. Wright: Frances Bergen

the Allan Fish Online Film Festival 2017

Anne Billson:  Horror and Women; That Darn Cat  (1965 film)(Cat of the Day); Lav Story: Toilets in Film

The Big Broadcast15 October

Bill Crider: The True Story of Jesse James [trailer]; The Purple Mask [excerpt]; Harlan Coben's The Five [promo]; Black Bart [excerpt]; Solomon Kane [trailer]; The Third Man (NTA/BBC tv series)Phantom Lady [trailer];
This is Elvis [trailer]Bulldog Drummond (1929 film)The Count of Monte Cristo (1956 tv series); Rock! Rock! Rock! [trailer]; Scaramouche (1923 silent film); The Face of Fu Manchu [trailer]; The Four Feathers (1939 film) [trailer]; The Prisoner of Zenda (1952 film) [trailer]; The Prisoner of Zenda (1937 film) [trailer]; In a Valley of Violence [trailer]








The Faculty of HorrorGremlins (1984)31 Days of Halloween: Andrea, and Alex; Cube

How Did This Get Made?The Wraith







John Grant: Un Crime; A Time to Kill (1955 film); Wrong Number (2002 film); Powers Boothe; "Tragic Error"; The Mysterious Doctor; Inquest; The Purple Gang; "Los Crímenes"

Jonathan Lewis: The Far FrontierPassengers (2016 film); Rasputin, The Mad Monk; Eyes of Texas; The Arnelo Affair

Judy Gold/Kill Me Now: Felicia Michaels

Karen Hannsberry: Great Villain Blogathon; Five Stars: Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyk, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis; Hold Your Man

Kate Laity: "Witches" at September Gallery

Ken Levine: next season's sitcoms; sitcom writing underachievement

Ken Reid/TV Guidance Counselor: Stephen Bissette, horror/comics guy

Kim Newman: KaboomDon't Let Him In; Cobra Woman

Kliph Nesteroff: The Steve Allen Christmas Show (1961); The Paul Lynde Show (with guest Jodie Foster).[..a vintage example of sub-par sitcom writing...]; East Side, West Side: "The Beatnik and the Politician" with Alan Arkin

Kristina Dijan: The Invisible RayUnion Depot; Great Villains Blogathon; The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)


The Long Shot: Tim Baltz; Helen Hong; Paul Danke; Jordan Brady

Louis Fowler: South Bronx Heroes; The Firm

Maria Alexander: What Star Wars (including the radio series) meant for me...

Mark Anthony Lacy: Top 12 1960s sexploitation films

Martin Edwards: Dead Man's Evidence; Don't Talk to Strange Men; Crimefest; AlliedThriller of the Year (stage); Danger by My Side; Stranger in Town






Patricia Abbott: 30 Rock; 1984 (1984 film); Late Night with David Letterman; A Quiet Passion 

Patricia Nolan-Hall: Ricardo Cortez; Simon and Laura; Five Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Laurel and Hardy, John Wayne; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Dial M for Murder (1954); Little Boy Lost; Me and My Pal; The Far Country

Paul D. Brazill: Dog SoldiersLast Cab to Darwin; Len and Company 

The Projection BoothThe Lost One; The Ninth Configuration; Who is Arthur Chu?; Mommie Dearest; Wanda Whips Wall Street; Rick Marx; Tami Stronach

Raquel Stecher: The Beguiled; Dancing Lady; What's Up, Doc?The China Syndrome

Ren Zelen: Something Wild

Rick: The African Queen; Five Stars: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Katherine Hepburn; Young Sherlock Holmes; Billy Wider; Marlowe; 
equestrian films

Rod Lott: Wolves at the Door; The Circle; Rest Stop: SST: Death Flight; SnakeEater; SnakeEater II: The Drug Buster; The Belko Experiment

Ruth Kerr: Night Nurse; You Can't Take It With You; Five Stars: Ida Lupino, The Nicholas Brothers, Thelma Ritter, John Wayne; Stella Dallas; TCM Classic Film Festival

Salome Wilde: A Woman's Face (1938 Sweden and 1941 US); Laird Cregar; Five Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre; Nazi noir: The Murderers are Among Us; Turn the Key Softly; noir and the Oscars; Finger of Guilt (aka Intimate Stranger)

Scott A. Cupp: Arsene Lupin; The Giant Claw; The Neanderthal Man (1953 film); Reaper: Pilot 

Sergio Angelini: Last Resort; The Woman in Green The Marseilles Contract

Stacia Kissick Jones: Johnny Guitar; Gas-s-s-s

Stacie Ponder: The Fog


Friday, December 15, 2017

Bill Crider, and some of his work and play, including some short stories: the FFB Crider Celebration Week

The Next Edition Quartet: Bill Crider, Ed Looby, Gary Logsdon and Richard Wolfe: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"


Bill Crider: How I Became a Mystery Fan

Karin Montin: Meeting Bill Crider

Victoria Kemp on Bill Crider

Richard Lupoff on Bill Crider

Richard Moore on longtime fellow-fandom and Bill's Truman Smith novels

James T. Cameron: We'll Always Have Murder: A Humphrey Bogart Mystery by Bill Crider

Curtis Evans: Romanced to Death by Bill Crider

Todd Mason:
I first "met" Bill Crider virtually, via the discussion groups on the web or which used email to distribute posts to the correspondents (or, eventually, both)...someone, I've managed to forget whom, was running a western-fiction discussion forum, Read the West, on the web, which rather suddenly shut down...but not before I became aware of discussion groups such as WesternPulps, conducted by James Reasoner, and Rara-Avis, conducted by William Denton. Though old friends and fellow crime-fiction fans and/or DAPA-EM contributors such as James and Richard Robinson contributed to the R-A list earlier, Bill's first post I can find on Rara-Avis is this:

Bill Crider [at his Alvin Community College address]
Sat, 26 Sep 1998 08:58:53 -0500


I've been lurking on this list for quite a while now, and I know there's some interest in the books of Robert Skinner. I thought the first two books (BLOOD RED, SKIN DEEP and CAT-EYED TROUBLE) were excellent. I was eagerly looking forward to the third book in the series. But now I may never see it. Kensington had the book set in print, had the cover designed, and even had bound galleys done. But the swine canceled publication! "Not enough advance orders" was the official reason given. If you've ever given thought to boycotting a publisher or writing an irate letter, Kensington is a deserving target. Bill Crider

...Rara-Avis always has encouraged a certain feistiness, as well as a certain likelihood that justice might be called for (and certainly Kensington has had more than a few sins to atone for over the decades). I joined there in the next year, along with FictionMags (where Bill would eventually join us in 2004) and WesternPulps. 

Bill was a consistently gracious and good-humored contributor, as you've probably experienced or very likely read from others if you're reading this when it's posted, on our Friday Books Celebrate Bill day...the late Mario Taboada and I would eventually begin conducting Rara-Avis when Bill Denton wanted to step away, and the flow of discussion there and on WesternPulps has slowed considerably over the years, with occasional flurries of new discussion and no lack of good contributors still subscribing. But, for many of us not excluding Bill most of the discussion started to move onto blogs (and Facebook, though Bill was less engaged there) by the mid 2000s. 

Bill Crider interviewed (via video chat) on Debbi Mack's The Crime Cafe, 2015


Bill was a poet even before a published fiction writer...sometime over the last couple of years, he took down the poetry and life-as-a-runner blogs he had going alongside Bill Crider's Popular Culture Magazine, and I've missed them.  I'm not sure how many of his short stories (a very few, I think) appeared before his first novel, The Coyote Connection (Ace/Charter 1981, with Jack Davis--not the cartoonist, but at the time a carpoolmate) a collaborative entry in the revived Nick Carter series (which had the venerable detective recast as a Men's Adventure Series spy or "Killmaster"). But I thought I'd cast around for a few of his stories for this week's FFB in books I've been meaning to write up for the Friday Books roundelay.

Quite probably the first time I saw Bill's byline was on the story "Wolf Night" in Ed Gorman's anthology, a mix of reprinted and original stories, the latter including Bill's, Westeryear (M. Evans, 1988). I picked up a library discard copy of the large print edition sometime around 1993-4,  Bill gets to have some fun with this historical western, touching on his love of  B and modestly-budgeted A western films, and horror films from the same era and level of studio support, in this tale of a strange menace attacking the women of a small Texas town in the post-Civil War era...but only on the nights with a full moon...and how the European immigrant schoolteacher in the town knows what might explain this, and what might be needed to stop this slaughter. You're likely to guess at least one of the surprises Bill has planted in this story as it reaches its conclusion, but he is having such fun with this, and sharing that fun, that I doubt you'll be too impatient in your anticipation. 

Rosalind and Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles Waugh's 14 Vicious Valentines (Avon, 1988) was an almost all-original anthology of short stories, and Bill's then new "My Heart Cries for You" is a much more thoroughly grim and noirish affair...there's some humor, including a few jokes that I suspect Bill might not've cracked not too long after he wrote this three decades or so ago, but which can be taken in stride when one considers these characters making the joking references are even more pathetic versions of the kind of "mean furniture" John D. MacDonald, and no few of the other writers Bill admired who were most active in the '50s and '60s, would describe.  The attempt at a long con, between a sort of low-rent Lothario and the woman who disgusts him, and her brother who hopes to have the protagonist bump her off, is well-told and has a very deeply felt sort of cosmic justice built into its climax. You might also detect a hint of Dortmunder or Ron Goulart characters in the attempts our anti-hero makes.

Karen and Joe R. Lansdale's Dark at Heart (Dark Harvest, 1992) feature's Bill's "An Evening Out with Karl", a leaner and even more vicious exploration of some of the same motifs at play in "My Heart Cries for You"; Karl is a predator, looking for tonight's woman Who Is Asking For It, It being a brutal rape if Karl can pull it off. So far, he's been able to avoid capture, and nearly half the too-numerous women he's assaulted haven't even reported the attack to the police, as far as he can tell. Karl prefers to do his hunting in small dance clubs, never visiting any two twice, then usually follows his victim home, breaking in while wearing his ski mask. This night, however...things don't go as planned. The sense of rough justice is also on display here, and some of the jokes in "My Heart..." are turned around in this one, literally as well as figuratively. Probably not a story you'd tell your children before bedtime (as this anthology isn't reaching for that sort of story at all), but if one wondered if Bill was sublimating some of his angrier impulses in some of his fiction, particularly these short stories, it wouldn't seem too wild a surmise. 

Jayme Blaschke interviewed folks at the 2016 ArmadilloCon, to help raise the spirits of Bill, who couldn't attend. A number of these brief statements are at this link, and here's Joe R. Lansdale's contribution:


Others are likely to cite Bill's work as a writer of nonfiction about crime fiction and popular culture, and at least one contributor to this blogpile was hoping to write about Bill's blogging work particularly, which leads me to mention one of his last regular deadline-hitting tasks, along with his contributions to Friday's Forgotten Books, the (real soon now) to be revived and regular Tuesday's Overlooked A/V, and Monthly Underappreciated Music roundelays: his continuation of the "Blog Bytes" column Ed Gorman had started in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine...which, we hope, might continue...in the current issue, one of Bill's columns is in place, but one suspects that there're not too many more in inventory at this time. Bill has cited most of the blogs he frequents which have some notable amount of attention to crime fiction, including this one, which got Sweet Freedom one of the biggest spikes in its viewership/readership it's had. And that only one of the smaller services Bill has performed for so many of  his friends and acquaintances, and the readers of his fiction and nonfiction and the fiction he's loved. And only a small token of his kindness toward me, and his willingness (as with James Reasoner, John Grant, Patti Abbott and others) to help out librarians and others trying to find "lost" and poorly-remembered items for their patrons and others...something I engage in through several mailing lists I'm still a member of. 

 Among Bill's "Very Bad Kittens"/VBKs videos...a fairly recent one, of them as young adult cats...


Bill is a wonderful man, and an excellent writer, and now a blasted disease is taking him much as it took his beloved wife Judy not so long ago, and leaving his adult kids and siblings...and Bill's cats, a trio of siblings who've become a very popular feature of Bill's Facebook account, and all his good friends and the rest of us that much less excellent company in this life. We hope, if you haven't read his work before, that this set of remembrances might nudge you along. I've met him face to face only once, at the mildly 9/11-haunted 2001 Bouchercon only a few miles from the Pentagon, but he's been a consistently good man to know, and I wish there was more I could do to make things better for him. He's certainly done a lot for a lot of us.


Bill Crider, Angela Crider Neary and Dana Cameron at the 2017 Bouchercon courtesy EQMM
 Angela Crider Neary on attending the 2017 Toronto Bouchercon with Bill.

Bill Crider on Facebook, 15 December 2017: Overwhelmed by kind thoughts and appreciation of me and my work. Wish I could write more. Can't.

For links to, and hosting some of, this week's reviews, remembrance and more, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Tuesday's Overlooked A/V: films, television and more...

La ragazza che sapeva troppo
The weekly assembly of links to blogposts, reviews, essays, podcasts and other items of interest about audio/visual work, usually first-rate and deserving of one's attention but sometimes less so and sometimes deserving of obscurity, up to and including opera, stage drama, conventions, museum exhibits, videogames (and boardgames), and more. Thanks to all who have produced the items linked to below! And please let me know if I've missed yours or someone else's.  

A useful resource I stumbled across the other week, but forgot to mention to those who might also be interested, Paul Di Filippo mentioned on a discussion list, an online archive of Broadcasting magazine, 1931-2002.  Todd Mason

A. J. Wright:  Boots Mallory

Alice Chang: consoles

Anne Billson: The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo)

The Big Broadcast: 9 April 2017

Bill Crider: Blood Father [trailer]

Bob Freelander: Never Too Young to Die

Brian Arnold: Don Rickles

Brian Keene/The Horror Show: Remembering Robert Bloch, with Stephen King, Jack Ketchum, F. Paul Wilson, David J. Schow, John Skipp, Tom Monteleone, Wayne Allen Sallee, Chet Williamson, Cathy Gonzalez, and Del Howison 

Brian Lindenmuth: "Times Like Dying"

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Classic Movie Salon: (Sunday after next, discussing) All the Presidents Men

Colin McGulgan: Springfield Rifle

Comedy Filn Nerds: Dino Stamatopoulos & Leah Tiscione; Ramon Rivas II

Cult TV: The Avengers (starring Diana Rigg): "Return to Castle De'Ath"

The.Avengers.1965.S04E05.Castle.De'ath. by superannuatedlps


Cynthia Fuchs: Colossal; The Bye Bye Man

Dan Stumpf: These Thousand Hills

Dave Wain: Underrated '87 films

David Cramner: The Salvation

David James Keaton: men out of prison films

Elgin Bleecker: It Always Rains on Sundays
Rita Moreno in The Fat Man

Elizabeth Foxwell: The Fat Man: "The Thirty-Two Friends of Gina Lardelli" (tv pilot); Robert Bloch centennial

Eric Hillis: Caltiki: The Immortal Monster

The Faculty of Horror: Calvaire and Martyrs (2008 film)

Gary Deane: Rural noir films

George Kelley: The Flash: "Duet"

"Gilligan Newton-John": 3-4 January 1981 primetime US broadcast network tv

How Did This Get Made?: xXx: Return of Alexander Cage

Iba Dawson: Kicks

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Accidents Will Happen; Beverly Hills Vamp; Crime Does Not Pay: "Buried Loot"; Crime Does Not Pay the series;  You'd Be Surprised

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Whodunnit?"

Jackie Kashian/The Dork Forest: Hal Lublin on Saturday Night Live (and The Great American Bake-Off)
Thrilling Adventure Hour cast featuring Hal Lublin
Jackie Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin: The Jackie and Laurie Show  

Jacqueline T. Lynch: I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now

Jake Hinkson: After Dark, My Sweet

James Clark: Paterson

James Reasoner: Flashback (1990 film)

Janet Varney/The JV Club: Linda Park

J. D. Lafrance: Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

Jerry House: TED Talks: Ze Frank on Nerdcore Comedy; Baywatch Nights

John Grant: The Naked Edge; Der Verdacht

John Scoleri: Dark Shadows Before I Die: the episodes reviewed

John Varley: Stagecoach (1939 film); The Girl in the Park

Jonathan Lewis: Gambling Lady

Juri Nummelin: The Glass House

Karen Hannsberry: Hope Emerson

Ken Levine: diagnosing problem scripts; WGA strike potential

Kim Newman: Secrets in the Walls; Pulgasari

Kliph Nesteroff: The Joe Franklin Show: David Frye, Jay Leno (1982)

Kristina Dijan: The Dark Tower; The HookLove Me Tonight; Canadian trivia; more Canadian trivia

Laura G: I Was a Shoplifter; Jamaica Inn; Infernal Machine

Leo Doroschenko/Andrew Porter: Alcoa Premiere (aka Fred Astaire's Premiere Theatre): "Mr. Lucifer" written by Alfred Bester

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Lindsay D: Midnight (1939 film)

Maltin on Movies: Hayley Mills

Martin Edwards: Blind Date (aka Chance Encounter; 1959 film); The Witness for the Prosecution (BBC TV 2016)

Marty McKee: The Mask of Fu Manchu; Ocean's 11 (1960 film)

Mildred Perkins: Home (2016 stage musical by Christy Hall and Scot Alan)

Mitchell Hadley: Cleveland/Youngstown TV listings, 10 April 1971; TV Guide 10 April 1971


Movie Sign with the Mads: The African Queen

Noel Vera: The Devils

Patricia Nolan-Hall: Avanti!

Patti Abbott: The Innocents

Paul D. Brazill: Tony Hancock

The Projection Booth: They Live

Raquel Stecher: Griffith Observatory; TCM Film Festival

Rick: For Love or Money; Le Mans

Rod Lott: Eliminators; Aftermath (2017 film); Minutes Past Midnight

Ruth Kerr: Gary Cooper

Salome Wilde: River (tv series)

Sergio Angelini: The House of Fear

Stacia Kissick Jones: Loophole (1981 film); The Internecine Project



Stacie Ponder: Mystics in Bali

Stephen Bowie: David Kelley

Stephen Gallagher: FantasyCon 2016

Steve Lewis: South Sea Woman; Frontier Circus: "Depths of Fear" (pilot)

Todd Mason: Robert Bloch: conventions and drama

TV Obscurities: March Home Media releases

Tynan: Starter for 10; Sing Street

Vienna: Tall, Dark and Handsome