Foster on Film

If there is a literary king of the Swashbuckler it would have to be Alexandre Dumas.  His fast-paced historical fiction (which held only a winking acquaintance with actual history) was serialized in French papers in the mid 1800s and was extremely popular.  His stories contained many of the elements that make a good film, so they have

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

Rob (Cian Barry) is broken and suicidal. His girlfriend, Nina (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) died in car accident. He’s given up his dreams, as someone who is in mourning does, taking a job at a supermarket and visiting weakly with Nina’s parents. His shy co-worker and paramedic in training, Holly (Abigail Hardingham), sees something in him and

Superman (Christopher Reeve) decides that he will free the world of nuclear weapons. Lex Luther (Gene Hackman) escapes from prison with a new plan: he will use Superman’s DNA to create an evil superman to stop Superman so that he can make money from weapons sales. Meanwhile, the Daily Planet has been bought, and the

Tony Stark, suffering from PTSD, battles the terrorist known as The Mandarin while trying to pull his life together. It’s charismatic, witty, Tony Stark, with 50% more whining. If your complaints with Iron Man 1 focused on it not being emo enough, you’ve found your film. There’s lot of good here, but the fun level

Hu Bayi (Chen Kun), Shirley Yang (Shu Qi), and Wang Kaixuan (Huang Bo) are ex-tomb raiders living on the streets of New York. Their last failed mission drudged up painful memories for Bayi who now mopes in the “sick” West. Years earlier, Bayi and Kaixuan had been part of a youth corps during Mao’s Cultural

Five years have passed (even though the film was released seven months later). After an exceptionally long synopsis of the events so far, we find out that The Bat is still at large, and still has hypnotic power over Flor. His plan is…well, the same as always. He wants the breastplate and armband again. And

When secretive scientist Gerald Deemer’s (Leo G. Carroll) partner turns up dead of an unlikely disease, the local doctor, Matt Hastings (John Agar) gets suspicious. But it is going to be a while before he discovers that a giant Tarantula is now running around the desert, killing cattle and the occasional person. Until then, he

Kindly but repressed school teacher Caroline Trewella (Glynis Johns) takes a trip to Cornwall to see the house she has inherited. It sits on top of a sea cave where a pair of mermaids frolic. The brighter of the two, Miranda (also Glynis Johns) shares a grandfather with Caroline—the two are doubles—and persuades her to

Graduate student Shirô is a passenger in a car driven by his wild and apparently supernatural “friend” Tamura when it hits and kills a local thug. Tamura doesn’t care but Shirô gets very upset. Eventually Shirô decides to turn himself in to the police, but the taxi crashes on route (most likely due to Tamura’s

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