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Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em: Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, or a Different Kind of Sucker
The movies by British studio Hammer Film Productions might be among the most fondly remembered shockers in the history of cinema. Some of them have even held a cult status in fan circles for decades and made their leading men and women world-famous. Christopher Lee, who – at an advanced age – has recently entered […]
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Private Investigations: The Birth of the Hard-boiled Detective in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon
Nowadays, devious investigators must be considered an integral part of the Hollywood repertoire. That wasn’t always the case. Their archetype is a guy named Sam Spade, who first appeared on the big screen in 1941. At the time, the character created by writer Dashiell Hammett had already been immensely popular as the hero of the […]
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School’s Out: John Hughes’s Cool Way to Skip Classes in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
When John Hughes died of a heart attack at age 59 in 2009, the filmmaking world lost one of its true greats in the comedy realm. His biggest box-office smashes as a writer have been family movies in the 1990s, such as Home Alone and 101 Dalmatians. Earlier, however, John Hughes had already pulled off […]