Cinemaventure

Yep. I'm a Monster Kid. Have been for almost 50 years since I first discovered a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine around 1959 or 1960. Before that my sister and I would catch as many horror flicks as possible. Rodan, Earth vs. the Spider, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Horror of Dracula and The Mummy are only a few that come to mind. Anything by Ray Harryhausen we would see twice. It was a fun time to grow up. And then I discovered Famous Monsters and Forrest J. Ackerman. Uncle Forry introduced me to the people behind the movies. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi became real people and not just faces on the big screen. I was introduced to Lon Chaney, Sr. and his wonderful movies and learned about James Whale and Karl Freund. I learned how Ray Harryhausen made saucers fly and monsters walk. The success of Famous Monsters brought other monster zines. Charlton offered a couple of titles for instance. Cheaper paper and fuzzy pictures, but they sometimes had so

Moonraker should have been the best entry in the Bond series to date, but unfortunately it was sabotaged by the script. There is often a fine line between witty and witless and Christopher Wood's screenplay was mostly on the wrong side of the line. The jokes were unusually tasteless and the handling of the character "Jaws" was like something out of a bad comic book. Visually Moonraker was gorgeous, but, unfortunately, the sound mixing made it easy to hear the dialog. The idea of a madman wanting to kill off Earth's population, except for certain "genetically superior" specimens was old hat in Science Fiction but offered possibilities. The visual effects of the space station and battle in space were stunning. So you definitely had the good and the bad here. "Jaws", introduced in The Spy Who Loved Me and played by Richard Kiel was another of the almost superhuman henchmen loved by the fans, but here he walked away from events that no human could s

I always enjoyed going to the monster and horror flicks as a kid. For about four years we lived a block away from a neighborhood movie theater, the Park, in east Knoxville. This is where I first saw House of Wax , in 3D, no less. I was introduced to the wonderful world of Ray Harryhausen through Earth Vs The Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles To Earth and, my favorite, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad . On occasion my sister and I would catch the bus downtown and see Rodan, Earth Vs the Spider and even turkeys such as The Viking Women . I did have some standards and refused to watch the bargain basement losers like King Kong Vs Godzilla for example . And then we discovered Hammer Films and the great team of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. A new world in glorious color opened up. Even today I enjoy watching these old movies when I get the chance. I would like the opportunity to see some of Bert I. Gordon's movies again. They were low budget, but fun. I watched The Viking Women

"Sean Connery Is James Bond!" was the slogan that attempted to draw audiences away from Casino Royale (1967) which claimed "Casino Royale is too big for one James Bond" The folks at Eon had nothing to worry about with the competition. Casino Royale was a costly fiasco and offered no real competition or entertainment value. On the other hand Eon tied in its fortunes with a star who wanted to leave the series. You Only Twice began the silly season for the James Bond films. So far gadgets were not overly intrusive and there was still some basis in the real world. But Raold Dahl's script changed that, resulting in the silliest moments to date in the series. For example we have James Bond trying to pass as Japanese. It doesn't work and Connery doesn't seem to be working hard at it, either. Also, the attempt to kill Bond by some inept thugs in a car chase indicates the bad guys are going to be pushovers and lack any subtlety at all. The last thing they woul

Indiana Jones is back and it's worth going to the theater to see a movie. I always loved going to the movies when I was younger. Of course the only options we had available were to see the movie at the theater or wait several years for it to show up on TV. The options for collectors were limited (in the US at least) to 8mm or 16mm films. When home video was introduced the quality was iffy and prices were high. Video stores could charge, and get, $10 a pop. As a kid fifty cents would bet me in the movie, a bag of popcorn, a coke and maybe a small box of candy. I still remember the sticker shock when tickets went up to a dollar. Even that was affordable enough to catch several movies in a week. For that matter, most movies didn't play over a week at any one theater unless it was a special like West Side Story for example. Now, I still enjoy seeing movies on a large screen, but the multiplex screens aren't that big and ticket prices are disgraceful. I only go to barg

Another chapter in Hollywood's history is closed. Charlton Heston, who epitomised larger-than-life characters on screen has now joined the greats like Cecil B. De Mille, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. There are now only a handful left who took part in Hollywood before it was taken over by the film school graduates and the Hate-America-First crowd. Charlton Heston played a wide range of characters, historical, mythical and archetypal. Moses, El Cid, Judah Ben-Hur, General Gordon of Khartoum, and even the greatest pirate of them all, Long John Silver. He worked in epics, westerns, science fiction, crime dramas; any genre that offered a part, because as an actor, work was the breath of life. There are no actor's in today's Hollywood capable of leaving such a vivid impression long after the movie has ended. For Moses, the best they could come up with recently was Dougray Scott. (Dougray?) As Norma Desmond said, it is the pictures that got small. Like John Wayne Charlton Heston l

The Alamo (pictured to the left) is a four-CD set from Silva Screen Records devoted to the music of Dimitri Tiomkin. Like most Silva releases it is a mixture of the good and the bad (and in one case downright ugly). It also combines new material with tracks from earlier releases. Still, it is worth getting. Disc One is devoted to the Westerns and is primarily instrumentals and most tracks, performed by the City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, are excellent. The first track is "Follow The River" from Night Passage an excellent film with James Stewart and Audie Murphy. Unfortunately the tempo is too fast, rushing through the lovely theme. Tension At Table Rock is represented next then High Noon, an instrumental arrangement of the song. The Wild Wild West is next, the two tracks being composed for an earlier proposed version of the television series. The tracks are the Main Theme and The Ballad Of Jim West. Gunfight At The OK Corral is represented by a suite. Unfortunatel