There's no easy way to say it. Journey Into Fear was in fact a journey into disappointment. I had picked up the Blu Ray a while back purely based on the stellar cast — Sam Watterson, Vincent Price, Donald Pleasance, Yvette Mimieux and a young Ian McShane! How could one go wrong? When I ran the opening credits (in lieu of a trailer) for Vonna, the cast list was sufficient for her to vote for this selection (over the likes of Jet Pilot and Jack the Giant Killer ). The film wastes no time getting to the action, abruptly starting with a car careening out of control down a hill; ultimately crashing in a fiery explosion. Sam Watterson survives the crash, and continues to experience a series of near-death experiences which, had this been a slapstick comedy instead of a 'thriller,' might have been more entertaining to watch. Yes, great actors pop up at nearly every turn, but almost all of them (including Watterson) are wasted on the material. Believe me when I say the story doesn...

Ray Bradbury was a gifted writer of great importance. Many of the authors whose work I cherish considered him a mentor. As I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with him a few decades ago, my fondness for Ray Bradbury, the man, even exceeds my fondness for his work. While I have enjoyed a number of his short stories, his novels, or stories woven together as novels, such as the case of The Martian Chronicles or The Illustrated Man , have never resonated with me.  I had never seen the film  The Illustrated Man , so it seemed a perfect candidate for this series. And it didn't hurt that a radio spot for the film was prominently featured in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (and included on the soundtrack album), which got me thinking about it for the first time in years. Rod Steiger plays the title character, a man whose body is nearly covered with tattoos, who encounters a young drifter, portrayed by Robert Drivas. The illustrated man is frankly a jerk...

  Having never experienced a Cinerama film presentation in person (in which three synchronized projectors display film shot across three cameras on a huge curved screen), I was very interested when the first Cinerama features were released on Blu Ray in a 'smilebox' widescreen format, designed to approximate the 146° curved Cinerama screen on a flat screen. I'm not sure how effective this is on a small screen, but on the Slaughtered Lamb's 120" screen, this 'smilebox' formatting definitely adds to the experience. (I included a 'smilebox' version of the trailer below so you can see the format firsthand.)  How the West Was Won was the first dramatic feature made using the three-camera Cinerama process (it had primarily been a format used for travelogues), and it's an epic story focusing on three generations of a family through several time periods in the 1800s; with three experienced directors brought in to shoot different sequences (John Ford di...

We've been singing The Green Slime theme song around The Slaughtered Lamb since first considering this as our 'G' entry in the 52 Pick-Up (if you've got an Amazon Echo, ask Alexa to play "The Green Slime"). That may have been one of the reasons why Vonna ultimately decided she could sit this one out, so I was left to face the green slime all on my own. I had a vague awareness that the film was a Japanese co-production, but I wasn't aware that it featured no Japanese actors in the cast! It does have the hallmarks of my favorite Japanese sci-fi films of the era, including cool (if not convincingly filmed) miniature ships and sets, and rubber men-in-suit monsters. Years later, director Kinji Fukasaku would go on to direct the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (which I have yet to see), and his final film was the very influential adaptation of the novel  Battle Royale . The Green Slime setup is this — an asteroid (Flora) is on a collision course wi...