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Hitchcock's films are still highly regarded and influential today due to his innovative storytelling techniques and ability to create suspense across multiple genres. The 1998 remake of Psycho, despite having a promising cast and director, was widely criticized for being a soulless cash grab that added nothing to Hitchcock's original masterpiece. Remaking or adapting any of Hitchcock's films is seen as inherently risky, as the potential for a successful update is often overshadowed by the reverence and elite status of the original works.

One particularly terrible remake of an Alfred Hitchcock horror classic is all the reason why the historic filmmaker's works shouldn't be touched. Although he released his final film as a living director in 1976, Hitchcock remains a titan of film history to this day, responsible for some of the most brilliant and innovative movies of the Hollywood Golden Age era and of all time. Earning the title of...

Doctor Who has a recurring joke about the Tardis being redecorated, showing that any character can have an opinion on interior design. The joke was first made in the classic episode "The Three Doctors" when the Second Doctor was unimpressed with the changes to the Tardis style. Throughout the series, different Doctors have made the same joke about the Tardis set, even though it continues to change with each new generation.

Doctor Who has reused many jokes throughout its long existence, and the recurring distaste expressed when the Tardis redecorates is one of the most prominent. Since Doctor Who's initial release on British television in 1963, the franchise has seen itself grow, develop, and expand. Yet, there are still some constants that fans can depend on with the sci-fi series.

The same joke about Doctor Who's Tardis — or really any other returning location —being redecorated has been made by Doctors and companions alike,...

Doctor Who is about to bring a comic book storyline to life. The recent trailer for Doctor Who's 60th anniversary specials revealed that the first of the three special episodes will be titled "The Star Beast" -- a title that's probably familiar to diehard fans. The reveal probably won't come as a total surprise, as this is a title with historic ties to the character of Beep the Meep, who has long since been confirmed to be appearing in the upcoming specials. However, the title does give fans some indication of what they might expect to see in the episode.

Back in 1980, long before the modern era of Doctor Who, "Doctor Who and the Star Beast" was the title of a comic strip storyline published in Doctor Who Magazine. It was this story that first introduced the character of Beep the Meep, a seemingly cute and cuddly alien with a sinister secret.

Decades before Psycho mortified theater audiences with its audacious plot twists, venerated director Alfred Hitchcock self-referentially dubbed his 1927 silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog as "the first true Hitchcock movie." Based on author Marie Belloc Lowndes' novel of the same name about a Jack the Ripper-inspired serial killer, it's easy to see why. Made in his native Britain, The Lodger is the Master of Suspense's third feature-length film, resting neatly at the beginning of his expansive oeuvre and marking the first time all the motifs synonymous with his name alchemized into a single product. The film's tightrope-delicate dance between barbed wire tension, daringly brazen social nuance, and a darkly subversive mystery fuse together to aptly foreshadow Hitchcock's entire career.

“Hitch Finding His Way”

By Raymond Benson

While there are many DVD collections (and VHS anthologies before that) of the early British material directed by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1920s and most of the 1930s, there are very few that contain decent transfers. The silent films, until recently, all existed in extremely poor quality, as so did most of the British sound pictures. Companies like The Criterion Collection and Kino Lorber have begun to finally restore these classics in high definition Blu-ray.

The new 2-disk Kino Lorber set, British International Pictures Collection, contains a handful of these early movies—The Ring (1927), The Farmer’s Wife (1928), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929), and the only sound feature in the bunch, The Skin Game (1931). They all display Hitch finding his way, exploring the possibilities of the medium, and trying to find his directorial “voice.” He was not yet the “Master of Suspense,” even though he...

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A quick look at the slinky sleight-of-hand involved in making movies about magic.

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Categories Not categorized 0% Your result has been entered into leaderboard Loading Name: E-Mail: Captcha: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Answered Review Question 1 of 10 1. Question

In 1932’s Chandu The Magician, Edmund Lowe plays the titular wizard. What famous boogie man plays his adversary?

Bela Lugosi Boris Karloff Peter Lorre Correct

Lugosi is a lot of fun but the real star of this movie is director William Cameron Menzies whose distinctive visual style graces every scene.

Incorrect

Question 2 of 10 2. Question

1953’s Houdini...

The Mad Magician

3-D Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1954 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 72 min. / Street Date January 10, 2017 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95

Starring: Vincent Price, Mary Murphy, Eva Gabor, John Emery, Donald Randolph, Lenita Lane, Patrick O’Neal, Jay Novello, Corey Allen, Conrad Brooks, Tom Powers, Lyle Talbot.

Cinematography: Bert Glennon

Editor: Grant Whytock

Original Music: Arthur Lange, Emil Newman

Written by: Crane Wilbur

Produced by: Bryan Foy

Directed by John Brahm

Twilight Time, bless ’em, hands us another treat to go with their 3-D discs of Man in the Dark, Miss Sadie Thompson and Harlock Space Pirate 3-D — and this time it’s a fun bit of 1950s horror — with a hot pair of short subject extras.

There have been plenty of theories as to why horror films became scarce after WW2; it’s as if the U.S. film industry took a ten-year break from the supernatural, and partly...

Fox’s first official monster movie is a terrific-looking but mostly flat mystery that tries its utmost not to be a horror film at all. It’s a head scratcher that will interest fans of the expressive John Brahm, and help completists scratch another werewolf film off their gotta-see lists.

The Undying Monster

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 62 min. / Street Date December 13, 2016 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring James Ellison, Heather Angel, John Howard, Bramwell Fletcher, Heather Thatcher, Aubrey Mather, Halliwell Hobbes, Alec Craig, Holmes Herbert, Eily Malyon, Charles McGraw.

Cinematography Lucien Ballard

<Film Editor Harry Reynolds

Original Music Emil Newman, David Raksin

Written byLillie Hayward, Michel Jacoby from a novel by Jessie Douglas Kerrruish

Produced by Bryan Foy

Directed by John Brahm

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

After the heyday of Universal horror in the first half of the 1930s, horror pictures went on the decline for over twenty years.

Kino Lorber announced the release of John Brahm's The Lodger (1944) on Blu-ray. Set in London during the Jack the Ripper murders, Robert (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and Ellen Burton (Sara Allgood) rent their spare room to an elusive man named Slade (Laird Cregar). When the Ripper murders begin to rise, the couple suspects Slade is somehow involved...

From Kino Lorber: "Coming Soon on Blu-ray!

The Lodger (1944) Starring Merle Oberon, George Sanders, Laird Cregar, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood - Directed by John Brahm."

Synopsis (via Blu-ray.com): "In London in 1889, retiree Robert Burton (Cedric Hardwicke) and his wife, Ellen (Sara Allgood), rent a spare room to the mysterious Slade (Laird Cregar) as Jack the Ripper continues to terrorize the city. The Burtons' niece, Kitty (Merle Oberon), is a music hall singer who initially grows fond of the eccentric lodger, but, when the Ripper's body count rises, she...

Lock your doors! Hulking menace Victor Buono gets the full-on psycho treatment, based (very) roughly on early reports of The Boston Strangler. The 'baby doll' killer also prefigures the fiendish Richard Speck. Burt Topper's film is routine but ex- Baby Jane star Victor Buono's performance is decidedly not. The Strangler DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1964 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 89 min. / Street Date November 10, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Victor Buono, Diane Sayer, Davey Davison, Jeanne Bates, Ellen Corby, Mimi Dillard, Selette Cole, David McLean, Baynes Barron, Michael Ryan, Russ Bender, Wally Campo, Byron Morrow, John Yates, James Sikking, Robert Cranford. Cinematography Jacques R. Marquette Film Editor Robert S. Eisen Original Music Martin Skiles Written by Bill S. Ballinger Produced by Samuel Bischoff, David Diamond Directed by Burt Topper

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The old-time independent producer Edward Small gravitated to United Artists in the 1950s, while his counterpart...

Ann Sothern, Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain, A Letter to Three Wives Linda Darnell, the gorgeous leading lady of numerous 20th Century Fox productions of the '40s, is Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" player this Saturday, August 27. TCM, which has leased titles from the Fox library, is showing 14 Linda Darnell movies, including no less than 9 TCM premieres. [Linda Darnell Movie Schedule.] Right now, TCM is showing writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's A Letter to Three Wives (1949), winner of Academy Awards for Best Direction and Best Screenplay. This curious comedy-drama about a husband who leaves his wife for another woman — but whose husband? Linda Darnell's, Jeanne Crain's, or Ann Sothern's? — also earned Mankiewicz the very first Directors Guild of America Award and a Writers Guild Award (which Mankiewicz shared with Vera Caspary) for the Best Written American Comedy. The husbands in question are Kirk Douglas, Paul Douglas, and Jeffrey Lynn.

We loves stills. And The Undying Monster.

You can’t go wrong with a werewolf picture, even when it’s one that’s a shameless knock-off of the Universal classic, recasting The Wolf Man as The Undying Monster in a classic pose your monster-loving pop subconsciousness is going to find awfully familiar.

Look:

Click for the massive version.

John Howard (maybe) strikes a classic pose on a foggy set. Indeed, Lucien Ballard’s atmospheric photography and John Brahm’s fluid direction do a lot to hide the B-picture origins of 20th Century Fox’s attempt to imitate The Wolf Man. I saw this on tv during the 50s long before the Universal pictures hit the tube and thought it was pretty cool. There’s a curse on the Hammond family, who live in a big manor house on the moors and are being knocked off by..something fuzzy.

Brahm, in...

From Abba to Hitchcock, Philip French picks his favourite fleeting 'blink and you'll miss them' moments

Alfred Hitchcock (Rebecca, 1940)

Hitchcock, the brilliant self-publicist who probably devised his own sobriquet "Master of Suspense", virtually invented the movie cameo en route to becoming the world's most recognisable director. His first screen appearance was in a newsroom sequence in The Lodger (1926). Initially, the signature walk-ons were spasmodic, before becoming a feature of each picture after his move to the Us, beginning with Rebecca (1940), where he is seen outside a telephone kiosk being used by George Sanders. Each reflects wittily on the movie.

Walter Huston (The Maltese Falcon, 1941)

The great character actor Walter Huston appeared in son John's directorial debut as Captain Jacoby, the merchant mariner in league with Kasper Gutman and co. He staggers into Sam Spade's office clutching a parcel containing a replica of the eponymous statuette, "the stuff that dreams are made of" [sic]. He says,...

The modern serial killer thriller, as established in 1991 by Jonathan Demme's expert The Silence of the Lambs and then further in 1995 by David Fincher's superb Se7en, has deteriorated into an uninventive collection of familiar tricks, tropes and tiresomely murky cinematography. If regurgitation has become the genre's guiding principle, there are far worse sources to plagiarize than the canon of Alfred Hitchcock, which is more or less what first-time writer-director David Ondaatje does with The Lodger, a modern update of the 1913 Marie Belloc Lowndes-penned mystery that was the basis for Hitch's 1927 silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Predictably, the results aren't nearly as inspired when viewed in direct comparison. Worse still, they're also not inspired when viewed through the prism of the past two decades' worth of likeminded cinema (and the network-tv behemoth C.S.I.). Stolidly including every cliché in sight while failing...

Arriving in New York and Los Angeles theaters this weekend is Sony's Stage 6 release of David Ondaatje's The Lodger, a remake of Alfred Hitchcocks 1927 silent film entitled The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog. Beyond the break you can read our exclusive interviews with director David Ondaatje and star Shane West. Based loosely on the original Hitchcock work as well as Marie Belloc Lowndes 1913 novel, The Lodger is about a killer who appears to be emulating the infamous murders of Jack the Ripper. Since the Ripper case was never solved, the detectives must try to figure out which of the Ripper suspects actions the murderer is following.....

A rotund Alfred Molina stars in The Lodger (opening in limited release this Friday ahead of its DVDebut February 10 from Sony Pictures) as Detective Chandler Manning, who’s got a wife in a mental ward, a daughter on the outs and residual guilt from his investigation of a series of murders years before, for which he suspects the wrong man was executed. Manning’s fears are realized when a new spate of killings begin in Hollywood, and like the earlier set, they follow the pattern of the original Jack the Ripper murders.

Meanwhile, housewife Ellen Bunting (Hope Davis) rents her dark guest house to a mysterious stranger (Land Of The Dead’s Simon Baker), who gives off every warning sign possible that he is up to no good. He demands that neither Ellen nor her husband (Donal Logue) disturb his privacy, even as he comes and goes in the dead of night.

By Neil Pedley

This week, a strong international lineup stacks up alongside some domestic B-movie madness and traditional big-budget nonsense.

"California Dreamin"

Despite being technically unfinished at the time of its 27-year-old director's tragic and untimely death in a car accident in 2006, this raucous satire from the late Romanian filmmaker Cristian Nemescu ably illustrates what a great young talent was sadly lost. Partly a slight of American hegemony, partly a where-do-we-go-from-here meditation on his homeland post-Cold War, Nemescu's darkly comic tragedy was inspired by true events. Unfolding against the backdrop of the Kosovo conflict, the story centers on a train carrying Nato military equipment through Romania before being delayed in a station by a corrupt railway chief in order to exploit its cargo and the U.S. Marines guarding it.

Opens in New York.

"Crips & Bloods: Made in America"

Having previously chronicled the origins and the history of surf culture...

• #41. The Lodger Director/Writer: David OndaatjeProducers: Michael Mailer (The Night Job) and Ondaatje Distributor: Stage 6 Films (Sony) The Gist: Adaptation of the bestselling novel, The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, this is re-set in West Hollywood, California with two converging plotlines. Overwhelmed by tensions in his personal life, Lasd detective Chandler Manning (Alfred Molina) becomes engaged in a complex cat-and-mouse game with a maniacal killer who begins emulating the 100-year old murders of Jack The Ripper along Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Simultaneously, the film follows the growing yet uneasy relationship between a psychologically unstable landlady, Ellen Bunting (Davis) and a handsome stranger, Malcolm Sleight, who appears one day and rents her guesthouse in West Hollywood. Fact: Passion project (read more here) was also the basis for Alfred Hitchcok's first ever movie. See It: Ondaatje's directorial debut has all the elements of being a great contemporary mystery thriller. Release Date/Status?

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• [Editor's Note: Today is the birth of what I already believe will be a popular feature here at Ioncinema.com. Our goal is simple: get into the mindset and put ourselves in the shoes of debut independent filmmakers as they embark on the creatively ambitious, professionally and artistically stimulating process of realizing a first or sophomore film. I've titled this monthly series "In the Pipeline" - as it corresponds to the notion of future filmmaking talent to watch for and it identifies film projects that are in the process of being instilled in the collective movie-going public psyche. Dabbling in auteur theory, demonstrating the lineage of past projects and shedding light into the creative process and possible pre-production jitters, we hope you enjoy this new series of personalized interviews.] David Ondaatje wants to scare you. In the edge-of-your-seat, heart pounding, what’s-about-to-happen kind of way. David Ondaatje also wants to move you. In the emotionally compelling, heartwarming, will-she-or-won’t-she kind of way. The first time feature filmmaker behind The Lodger has set the bar high with his adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1912 novel, which was the basis for Hitchcock’s 1927 same-titled film. With four successful shorts under his belt, Hope Davis and Alfred Molina on the screen, Michael Mailer in the producer's chair and David Armstrong behind the camera, Ondaatje has every reason to believe his goal will be met. Lowndes’s novel tells the true story of a woman the author met at a dinner party who claimed Jack the Ripper was staying at her boarding house. Intrigued by the idea, Ondaatje has taken this premise and set it in modern day Los Angeles. Pulling his

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• If you are moments away from commencing your feature-length, directorial debut then lassoing a pair of thesps in The Hoax's Alfred Molina and Hope Davis is a major coup. Molina was already attached in writer/director David Ondaatje's passion project and most likely is the reason why Davis' name came up when casting the 'landlady' of the pic. Going into production next month under the new Sony label Stage 6 Films, The Lodger is a reimagining of the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel that served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's debut pic, 1927's "The Lodger." Ondaatje-penned script, set in present-day Los Angeles, has two converging plotlines: The first involves a cat-and-mouse game between a troubled detective (Molina) and an unknown killer; the second explores the relationship between an emotionally disturbed landlady (Davis) and her enigmatic "lodger"....

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