I had never seen Breakdown  before, but I'm a big Kurt Russell fan, and it seemed to bear more than a passing resemblance to Richard Matheson's 1953 short story "Dying Room Only" (which he adapted into a TV movie of the same name in 1973), so I thought it was a good candidate from screening in The Slaughtered Lamb. Jeff Taylor (Russell) and his wife Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) are driving cross country for a new start in San Diego when their new Jeep breaks down in the middle of the desert. A passing trucker offers to drive them to a nearby diner so they can call a tow truck, but Jeff isn't comfortable leaving their new car with all their belongings unattended. He opts to stay behind while Kathleen goes with the trucker. While waiting, he realizes the problem was due to some loose wires, and is able to start the car. He drives to the diner, but there's no sign of Amy. He then drives towards the next town, and spots the truck that Amy left in. He forces the driver t...

I decided that the alphabetical order approach served us well in the first half of this series, so we'll keep that up for the next six months as well! Kicking things off is Frank Marshall's directorial debut, Arachnophobia . I'm a sucker for spider movies — the 70s was a golden era for nature run amok (favorites include Kingdom of the Spiders and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo ), and I hadn't seen this one in decades. I assumed Vonna and I had seen it together, but she had no recollection of it (and unlike me, she retains the tiniest of details once she's seen a film).  Jeff Daniels moves his family to a small town in California to be the local doctor, only to be surprised when the old-timer he was planning to replace decides he's not ready to retire. Timed with their arrival is the body of a photographer who was bitten by a huge, extremely venomous spider in Venezuela, and unbeknownst to anyone, the spider traveled with him. It sets up shop in Daniel's barn,...

  Zorro, The Gay Blade , was released the month after Raiders of the Lost Ark  in 1981, though I can't recall if I first saw it theatrically. I was already familiar with George Hamilton from the Dracula spoof Love At First Bite , which preceded this film. And I was quite surprised to discover that his next theatrical role wasn't until The Godfather Part III in 1990! Hamilton does a fine job in the dual roles of Don Diego Vega and his flamboyant brother Ramon (aka Bunny Wigglesworth) — sons of the recently departed Zorro. And a shout out to James Booth, as the eyepatch-wearing Velasquez, who would later play Ernie Niles in Twin Peaks .  After the original Zorro's offscreen death, he bequeaths his legacy to his sons; first Diego, and when he injures himself, Ramon takes over — more flamboyantly, as you would expect. Don Diego's Esteban makes it his goal to track down Zorro, and one of my favorite scenes is a classic masked ball where attendees all come dressed as Zorro, b...

Richard Matheson adapted his 1960 novel, The Beardless Warriors , which was based on his experiences in World War II, into the film The Young Warriors . While I own a 16mm print of the film, it has never been officially released on home video. For the sake of this series we watched an anamorphic widescreen DVD-R of the film that I've had for some time. Private Hacker (Hackermeyer in the novel) is the latest 18 year-old to be assigned to Sergeant Cooley, who complains that he's running a boy scout troop. Cooley takes Hacker under his wing, and in no time at all, his new kid is proving to be a star in the rifle group. Whereas the book is a dark journey that takes place over a two-week period where Hackermeyer goes from a new recruit to a battle-seasoned veteran, the film is a somewhat lighter take on the material. Apparently much of Matheson's story was jettisoned in order to re-work the film to incorporate existing footage from the 1955 Universal Audie Murphy story,  To Hell...

When it came to the letter x, under consideration were the Hammer film X The Unknown , the 80s sleazy sci-fi Xtro , Ti West's recent horror film, and this one. Well, the presence of Don Rickles, and its reputation as a Roger Corman classic led us to selecting  X  (aka X - The Man With X-Ray Eyes , though that more recognizable title doesn't actually appear onscreen).  Ray Milland plays a scientist interested in pushing man's ability to see beyond a limited 10% of the light spectrum. When his funded research kills a hapless monkey, he decides it's time to try his serum on himself. Sure enough, he soon sees the world in psychedelic colors, and then through specific objects. My favorite bits were those with Don Rickles, a carnival barker to Milland's Mentallo (undercover after accidentally bumping a doctor pal out a window — oops!). And it doesn't hurt that Corman regular Dick Miller shows up in one of the scenes . I hadn't realized going in that the film was w...