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There are people who’ll tell you that Japanese folklore fantasy Monkey airing at 6pm on Friday nights in the 1980s was the highpoint of post-school, pre-bedtime TV scheduling in the UK. Let’s not tell them that they’re wrong; let’s just pity them for having mistimed their childhood by a decade.

The 1990s were the real peak of the 6pm weeknight TV slot. As long as there was no Wimbledon, snooker, cricket, athletics or Horse of the Year Show, that’s where anyone too young to go to the pub found joy. While grown-ups were watching the Six O’Clock News, kids in households flush enough to have a second television switched on BBC Two or Channel 4. There, to quote Howard Carter upon breaking into Tutankhamun’s tomb, they found wonderful things.

Before the youth-oriented Def II brought 1970s reruns to the slot, weekday teatimes on...

Paul Huntley, the celebrated wigmaker for film, stage and television who provided Dustin Hoffman with the coif that transformed the actor into Tootsie and did the same decades later for when Santino Fontana originated the role in a Broadway musical, died this morning at his London home following a short illness. He was 89.

His death was announced in a post today on his Instagram page.

During his more than five-decade career, he helped give the felines of Cats their sheen, topped Patti LuPone’s Evita with the now famous blonde bun and styled the signature black and white job Glenn Close wore as Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmations.

Huntley, who moved back to his native London recently from his longtime Manhattan home, retired earlier this year when Broadway’s Covid pandemic shutdown halted his professional opportunities, and after becoming bedridden following a fall at his Upper West Side home. His...

“You fool! You can not stop me! I am the ninja! No one, nothing can stop me!.”

BearManor Media has published The Cannon Film Guide, a Trilogy of Books About the Movies Released By the Legendary 1980s B-Movie Studio, Cannon Films. Order The Cannon Film Guide Here

Volume One Available Now: Over 500 Pages Covering the Company’s First Five Years under the Leadership of B-Movie Icons Golan and Globus

From 1980 until 1994, The Cannon Group was responsible for the production of more than 200 films. Quantity, rather than quality, was the key to Cannon’s game: their output included many of the 1980s’ most beloved (and notorious) b-movies. Along the way they dipped their toes into every imaginable genre of movies, made stars out of Chuck Norris and Michael Dudikoff, kicked off the ninja and breakdancing crazes, and kept Charles Bronson working into the twilight of his career. While it’s rare...

Hello, readers, and welcome to a new year of releases! We may already be well into the month of January, but this is our first official weekly Blu-ray and DVD recap of 2019, since last week was a quiet one on the home media front, and we already have a ton of titles to get excited for this Tuesday. If you happened to miss Hell Fest when it was in theaters last year, you can now catch up with Gregory Plotkin’s slasher on various formats, and as far as recent genre series are concerned, the first seasons of both The Purge and Castle Rock are making their way home tomorrow as well.

Scream Factory is kicking off another great year of releases with the Nic Cage thriller 8Mm, and Scorpion Releasing has put together a special edition Blu for Blind Date that cult fans are going to want to pick up.

This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor discuss Eclipse Series 36: Three Wicked Melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures.

About the films:

During the 1940s, realism reigned in British cinema—but not at Gainsborough Pictures. The studio, which had been around since the twenties, found new success with a series of pleasurably preposterous costume melodramas. Audiences ate up these overheated films, which featured a stable of charismatic stars, including James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Stewart Granger, and Phyllis Calvert. Though the movies were immensely profitable in wartime and immediately after, Gainsborough did not outlive the decade. This set brings together a trio of the studio’s most popular films from this era—florid, visceral tales of secret identities, multiple personalities, and romantic betrayals.

Jean Kent: British film star and ‘Last of the Gainsborough Girls’ dead at 92 (photo: actress Jean Kent in ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons’) News outlets and tabloids — little difference these days — have been milking every little drop from the unexpected and violent death of The Fast and the Furious franchise actor Paul Walker, and his friend and business partner Roger Rodas this past Saturday, November 30, 2013. Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly — apart from a handful of British publications, the death of another film performer on that same day went mostly underreported. If you’re not "in" at this very moment, you may as well have never existed. Jean Kent, best known for her roles as scheming villainesses in British films of the 1940s and Gainsborough Pictures’ last surviving top star, died on November 30 at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England. The previous day, she had suffered a fall at her...

Former Cannon Films exec and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves co-producer dies aged 87.

Former Cannon Films executive Michael J Kagan has died in London aged 87.

Kagan was head of production at well-known indie Cannon between 1982-88, during which time he was associate producer on two films directed by UK director Michael Winner: the 1983 remake of The Wicked Lady, starring Faye Dunaway, Alan Bates and John Gielgud, and Death Wish 3 in 1985.

He was also executive producer on Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987).

At its height in the 1980s, Cannon, then owned by renowned producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, was producing dozens of films per year, many of them B-movie classics.

Later in his career Kagan was line producer on Roger Spottiswoode’s action-comedy Air America and co-producer on box office hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as well as Stephen Sommers’ The Jungle Book.

Kagan is survived by his wife Kate.

Death Wish: Michael Winner’s movie vs. original novel [See previous post: "Michael Winner Dies."] "The point of the novel Death Wish," adds author Brian Garfield, "is that vigilantism is an attractive fantasy but it only makes things worse in reality. By the end of the novel, the character (Paul) is gunning down unarmed teenagers because he doesn’t like their looks. The story is about an ordinary guy who descends into madness." (Photo: Death Wish Charles Bronson.) A few years ago, Sylvester Stallone had plans to remake Death Wish, which (probably not coincidentally) has elements in common with Stallone’s (perhaps even more brutal and more pro-vigilantism) Cobra (1985). Stallone’s Death Wish remake, however, never came to fruition. Early in 2012, The Grey‘s director Joe Carnahan stated that he was planning an updated version of Death Wish. Michael Winner’s other ’70s movies: Directing Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and more Charles Bronson Among Michael Winner...

Flamboyant film director, best known for Death Wish, and later an outspoken restaurant critic and bon vivant

Michael Winner, who has died aged 77, supplied interviewers with a list of more than 30 films he had directed, not always including the early travelogue This Is Belgium (1956), mostly shot in East Grinstead. But his enduring work was himself – a bravura creation of movies, television, journalism, the law courts and a catchphrase, ''Calm down, dear", from an exasperating series of television commercials.

He was born in London, the only child of George and Helen Winner, who were of Russian and Polish extraction respectively. His builder father made enough money propping up blitzed houses to invest in London property. The profits funded his wife's gambling, which, her son complained, so distracted "Mumsie" that he was never paid due attention. She left him in the bedroom with the mink coats of guests who came to his...

Andrew Pulver looks back through some of the key films of director Michael Winner, who has died aged 77

Play It Cool (1962)

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After a string of short films, Winner broke into features in the early 60s, with low budget thrillers and trendy pop musicals. Quite a few of them had "cool" in the title – including the nudie pic Some Like It Cool. The Billy Fury pic Play It Cool was considerably more commercially viable, no doubt inspired by the success of Cliff Richard's Young Ones film. Fury – in a real stretch – plays an up-and coming rocker called Billy Universe; Anna Palk the heiress who he might or might not get together with, and Dennis Price (!) as her overbearing dad.

The Cool Mikado (1962)

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Frankie Howerd led the line for Winner's followup, produced by Howard Baim,...

If you’ve seen Skyfall, you’ve witnessed the wrong-headed update of the venerable MGM logo, zooming out from the iris of Leo the Lion’s eye! Apparently no one reminded the powers that be that “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” That’s why I was happy to receive the Criterion Collection’s set of Gainsborough Pictures DVDs, in one of its no-frills Eclipse editions, not only because I like those 1940s films (The Man in Grey, Madonna of the Seven Moons, The Wicked Lady) but because I love their logo! It isn’t one of the more famous movie trademarks, but it’s certainly one of the most distinctive, with a gracious...

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Walt Disney Home Entertainment brings their most famous princess to Blu-ray with the Cinderella Diamond Edition. When people talk about Disney Princesses, Cinderella is the first one that comes to mind. Although it's obviously targeted to a female audience, there's enough humor found in the antics of the mice, the cat Lucifer, the Prince's father, and his assistant to keep male audiences at least mildly entertained for the movie's 75-minute runtime. This is an exceptional fairy tale film, although a true element of evil like a witch or a sorceress who can turn herself into a dragon is sorely missed. Evil stepmothers just don't hold the same peril for me as something supernatural.

After her father dies, Cinderella is left to the mercy of her stepmother. The wicked lady puts her stepdaughter to work as a servant. She cooks and cleans after the vile stepmother and her two daughters with...