Long before Michael Medved went all Moral Majority on us, he and his brother Harry produced a book dedicated to showing the best that bad film had to offer. The Golden Turkey Awards published the skinny on 31 mostly gawdawful flicks, and I'm proud to say (or embarrased to admit, depending on what day you catch me on) that I've seen quite a few of them. Just for fun (and because I'm bored), I decided to search on the title of each of those films, choose whatever I felt was the most interesting result, and post it here for your amusement/edification/ridicule/whatever:

Robot Monster
Rat Fink a Boo Boo
They Saved Hitler's Brain
The Conqueror
The Thing with Two Heads
The Food of the Gods
The Terror of Tiny Town
Change of Habit
Jesus Christ Superstar
Scream, Blacula, Scream
Attack of the Mushroom People
Dondi
The Tingler
Plan Nine from Outer Space

Props to Matt at Scrubbles for posting the hilarious Eegah! website which I thought was one of the original Golden Turkeys, but actually came from Harry Medved's first book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's Not Just Michael Powell, a site that's chockablock with galleries of photos, bios, and cigarette cards of British stars from film and telly.

That's a picture of Harry Secombe from the classic Goon Show lighting the cigar of a very young and exceedingly ugly Peter Sellers.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:48 AM | Permalink

My son and I saw Hellboy yesterday afternoon. We both agreed that it was probably the best translation of a comic book to screen that we'd seen: great characters, dark cinematography, dialogue that was fairly intelligent and not peppered with stupid action-flick one-liners, imagery taken directly from Mike Mignola's excellent comic, and eldritch, terrible, multi-tentacled elder gods right out of H.P. Lovecraft.

Oh yeah...and Nazis...gotta have Nazis.

Take a look at this excellent gallery of Hellboy comic-book covers, and check out the online comics at the Playboy website (if anyone asks, you can honestly tell them you're only reading it for the cartoons).

Googling on the film's chief villain, Rasputin, turned up this fab site about Alexander Palace, home of the Romanovs.

P.S. I forgot to mention that one of my favorite things, reliquaries, figure prominently in the plot...mmm, saintly....[drool]

Posted by MrBaliHai at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm back from Minneapolis where my family and I spent a relaxing Easter weekend. Here's a few links I collected along the way:

Ever wonder whatever became of Budgie, that plodding British metal-boogie band from the 70s? No, neither do I, but I still dig the acid-drenched Roger Dean artwork on their album covers.

Nostalgic for old advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films? Spend a few happy hours clicking around in the fantastic collection of the Prelinger Archives and you can find Cold War gems like General Electric's nuclear propaganda flick, A is for Atom. Man, I remember watching that in 5th grade.

via Robot Action Boy

Posted by MrBaliHai at 9:05 PM | Permalink

I stumbled across this swell gallery of film-noir posters while looking through some of the links from my last entry. Noir Cinema's website may not be pretty, but it sure delivers the goods.

My favorite noir film is Edgar G. Ulmer's Poverty Row quickie, Detour, they don't come any bleaker than this hardboiled tale of a down-on-his-luck piano player and a psychotic, murderous dame on the lam.

And if you can't quite make sense of all the gritty dialogue in these cinematic gems, check out Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)