Foster on Film

In a bleak Estonian village, the peasants survive with the help of witchcraft and folk magic, which is as much a part of everyday life as the tree bark they eat. The most notable magic takes the form of “kratts,” automatons made from wood, bone, straw, farm implements, and eventually even snow, and animated by

Ten years after the death of eccentric Cyrus Norman, the family converge on his bayou mansion, cared for by Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard), for the reading of his will by lawyer Crosby (George Zucco). The potential heirs include radio personality Wally Campbell (Bob Hope), beautiful actress Joyce Norman (Paulette Goddard), aunts Susan and Cicily (Elizabeth

Maximus (Claude Rains) performs a mind-reading act with the assistance of his wife, Rene (Fay Wray). They travel with an aging partner (Ben Field) and Maximus’s mother (Mary Clare). When a performance falls apart, he receives an actual prophecy. Predicting the future casts him into the limelight, which brings money but starts to pull his

An acting troop, including young lead Sun Xiaoou (Chau-Shui Yee) and his girlfriend Liu Die (Xu Manli), arrives at a dilapidated theater, and are greeted by only Zheng (Wang Weilyi), the guardian of the theater and a hunchback with a monstrous appearance, that no one ever mentions. They set to work on a new opera,

Crooked Privy Councillor ten Brinken (Albert Bassermann) has had some success with his experiments with artificially inseminating rats, and wants to take it to the next level: inseminating a prostitute with the sperm from a dead murderer. Seems like that shouldn’t be the next level, but hey, I’m not a mad scientist, so what do

Police detective Jimmy Kelly (Wally Ford) and ex-department store detective Marjorie Burns (Barbara Pepper) are in a hurry to get married so hop across the border to the Red Rock Tavern, which is instead an inn—I suppose when the producers couldn’t find a tavern set for cheap they decided it was too much effort to

Death (Fredric March) wants to understand humans and their reaction to him so decides to take on human form and spend three days on the estate of Duke Lambert (Sir Guy Standing) in the guise of Prince Sirki. Death makes one rule: the Duke cannot tell any of the others in attendance who he really

Nina MacCarron (Rosemary La Planche), daughter of the late Doctor Carruthers, of “Devil Bat” fame, is found comatose, having just arrived in town. She has a fear of vampires and her father, and she’s put under the care of expert psychologist Dr. Clifton Morris (Michael Hale), who wants to kill his wife and put the

Surrealistic or just nonsensical, the low-budget to low-low-budget Phantasm films (four with a fifth past-due for release) have a reputation for being original fright-fests. That’s unfortunate as that raises the wrong expectations. Far from attempting for originality, the series is a conglomeration of what came before. Scenes and even lines are taken from previous films.

A physicist (Kristen Wiig), a ghost hunter (Melissa McCarthy), an engineer (Kate McKinnon), and a mass-transit ticket-taker (Leslie Jones) join forces to form the Ghostbusters. A disgruntled janitor is summoning ghosts in order to carry out a larger scheme that will wipe out humanity and our team must use their high tech gadgets to defeat

In 1944, a young Professor Broom accompanies a military unit on a mission to stop Rasputin (Karel Roden) and The Third Reich from carrying out a magical ritual that will end the world. They succeed—though Rasputin’s loving assistant, Ilsa Haupstein (Biddy Hodson) and the freakish assassin Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran) escape—and find a horned,

The crew of a colony ship is awakened by an accident—except for their synthetic, Walter (Michael Fassbender), who was awake—and while making repairs, picks up a signal. The new, uncertain captain, who needs the approval both of the crew and of God, decides to follow the signal to its Earth-like world which might be a