Foster on Film

Charles Regnier (Carl Esmond) return to Paris to great acclaim for his soon to be published novel, meeting with his patron, Henry Borchard (Douglass Dumbrille), who advises him that he need not fear the government, which is upset that his story approaches the truth of a corrupt trial. But Charles is bothered by more than

Distraught physician Peter Tompson (Brook Williams) writes his mentor, Sir James Forbes (André Morell) a rambling letter about deaths with no natural explanation in a rural village. Forbes’s daughter (Diane Clare), interested in seeing her friend Alice (Jacqueline Pearce) who happens to be Tompson’s wife, convinces her father to take train and coach to visit

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 group of teens, each defined by one attribute (the Jewish one, the fat one, the black one, the girl, etc.), who are bullied and have terrible parents, are set upon by an evil clown (Bill Skarsgård). Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, It removes the half of the book—the weird

A cruel Marquis tortures and imprisons a beggar. Many years later a beautiful servant is tossed in with the beggar who rapes her. She later kills the Marquis and escapes, and is taken in by Don Alfredo Carrido (Clifford Evans), where she gives birth and dies. The child is cursed, an evil spirit entering him

Joe Valerie dies at Dr. Paul Cornelius’s (Warner Oland) clinic, trading knowledge of where he hid a million dollars in stolen loot for euthanasia. Soon after, Joe’s wife (Jane Darwell) falls to her death after seeing Joe’s ghost. The police, picking up fraudulent spiritualists, get one who’s real, Patricia Merrick (Dorothy Wilson). So on a

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,

Successful author William Magee (Gene Raymond) makes a bet that he can finish a novel in 24 hours and heads to a secluded lodge, that’s closed for the winter season, to do so. The timid caretakers meet him there and give him the only key to the place before leaving. He adjourns to a room

Professor Morlant (Boris Karloff) dies with a final instruction to his servant (Ernest Thesiger), for a mystical gem to be left in his hand when he is put in his crypt, that way when he rises from the dead, he can go straight to paradise. But the gem is stolen. Days later, the heirs, Ralph

Dr. Maximiliano Renan (Ramón Pereda) will do anything to save his dying and paralyzed wife, and as he’s a mad scientist, complete with hunch-backed assistant (Enrique Gonce), his methods involve strange experiments on young women. His attempts with the recently deceased failed, so now he’s taken to kidnapping women from the hospital, who then die

The local ferryman meets the personification of death (Peter Voß) one night, and dies on his ferry. The town advertizes for a new ferryman, but there are no local takers as the townspeople fear an evil force roams the other side of the river. Maria (Sybille Schmitz) wanders into town, lacking papers, so is a