Scream and Scream Again may sound like an AIP co-production packed with a stellar Hammer Films cast, but this supposed ‘vampire killer’ thriller is really three seemingly disparate storylines that converge in the final act…
Jess Franco’s Count Dracula is an example of what happens when certain parameters designed to bolster a production’s salability reduce a filmmaker, known for sex and violence and trippy perversions, to a hired gun, and a bored one at that…
During the filming of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), experimental filmmaker Pere Portabello was engaged to direct a making-of documentary, titled Cuadecuc, vampir (1971), and sometime before, during, or after, it seems star Christopher Lee was snagged to appear in a few scenes which Portabello edited into a feature film…
Scripted by Robert Towne (and preceding his Oscar-winning classic Chinatown by a year), Detail is also renowned for packing in a then record-breaking level of “fucks,” which must have made studio Columbia rather nervous in unleashing such a profanity-laden film on audiences…
In a peculiar stroke of luck, author Darryl Ponicsan managed to strike gold and have two films based on separate works produced and released in one year. Both deal with sailors in the U.S. Navy, but where Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail steered very gradually from comedy to drama, under the baton of Mark Rydell, Cinderella Liberty moves from overt comedy to melodrama, which isn’t necessarily a detriment to Ponicsan’s material…
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