After handling the social dramas Gentleman’s Agreement and Pinky, director Elia Kazan returned to the docu-style of Boomerang, this time relishing the tension of a city manhunt for a handful of possibly infected plague carriers. Kazan’s use of genuine locations is superb, capturing the grime of poverty-row housing, ethnic ghettos, and the gleaming city buildings and streets which house nervous state officials looking for a quick fix for a messy problem…
Decades after an alien visitation, a return of the interstellar creatures mandates a troupe of black ops to track them down to as insolated farmhouse where they find William Cassidy, a wiry man (Julian Richings) with a history of publishing conspiracy theories, and a refusal to detail the events of what killed one of their own, and what still lurks outside…
Not dissimilar to the time-travelling sci-fi thriller Primer (2004), Singularity Principle (2013) has a handful of characters pushing theory into reality, in this case developing a working mechanism to unearth and cross over into a parallel world that wreaks havoc with more than the personal lives of cosmic scientists…
From William Shakespeare’s classic play A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream of fairy dusted lovers true and accidental, errors in judgment, and wacky hijinks between various couples, to Ingmar Bergman’s variation Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) in which said hijinks are isolated to one extended night, we have another extrapolation from Woody Allen…
Although Jack Hill’s Spider Baby (shot in 1964, released in 1967) should’ve been the calling card for another feature-length gig, that film’s delayed release had the director bouncing around, working on a racing film as a contract writer for Universal for a blip before going back to the indie world, directing what he thought was going to be material for a proposed 4-picture deal with a Mexican producer starring Boris Karloff…
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