In the Year 2889 (The Cornfield #22)

The number 2889 shall henceforth measure the distance between resonant childhood experience and cold-eyed adult perspective on a movie. I recently re-watched In the Year 2889 for the first time since seeing it at age twelveorwhatever, and the effect was having a movie-memory full of mystery and magic brought crashing down to earth. I had [...]

Not of This Earth (The Cornfield #20)

Because I have been tooling around the state of Washington giving a talk on the subject of the alien-invasion movies of the 1950s, the Shout Factory DVD release of a Roger Corman triple comes as a welcome refresher on this title. Attack of the Crab Monsters and War of the Satellites will have to wait [...]

Hannibal (The Cornfield #17)

Anthony Hopkins is on the loose again this weekend in The Rite, and this reminds us of how his career changed when he adopted Hannibal Lecter as his avatar. This review of Hannibal, published at Film.com in 2001 (the movie opened almost exactly ten years after The Silence of the Lambs), observes the way Hopkins, [...]

Black Moon (The Cornfield #12)

Very first thing in the movie is the sight of a wealthy urban sophisticate sitting in her child’s room, beating out a hypnotic rhythm on a large primitive drum. This is Juanita Perez Lane (Dorothy Burgess), wife to successful businessman, hale ‘n hearty, everybody-loves-him Stephen Lane (Jack Holt). Check her name: two exotic morsels followed by [...]

The Crazies (The Cornfield #4)

It’s almost Halloween, so: George Romero’s 1973 non-zombie offering, recently remade with some respectable actors and a budget. Both films follow the same general outline: a military plane carrying a sample of a biological weapon crashes near a small town (western Pennsylvania in the original, Iowa in the remake), seeping into the water supply and infecting the [...]

Repulsion

This piece on Repulsion was written, like the Rosemary’s Baby essay, for a Polanski series at the University of Washington in 1986.–Robert Horton There’s this rabbit, you see, this rabbit that is first mentioned in the opening minutes of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and actually appears in the flesh a few minutes after that. It’s intended [...]

The Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter by Robert Horton “I’ll be back,” the man calls out, “when it’s dark.” Those words are the warning, and the credo, of every monster that ever slouched through fairy tale or film. Toward the end of The Night of the Hunter, they are uttered by Harry Powell, the evil preacher [...]

Let the Quantum In (Weekly Links)

A slow week for openings, thanks to 007. My Herald reviews: Quantum of Solace. Let the Right One In. And for the Seattle Channel, I banter with Nancy Guppy about the new Bond picture and a box set featuring Gregory Peck: here. I talk with KUOW-FM’s Jeremy Richards about 007 things and Buster Keaton’s The General. [...]

Psycho

Psycho, by Robert Horton What good came from Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho? Well, it was nice to hear Bernard Herrmann’s music throbbing out of Dolby stereo theater speakers. The color design confirmed Van Sant’s talent as an inventive art director. Anne Heche was alert and vulnerable in the birdlike role Janet Leigh [...]

Halloween Countdown: Godzilla x 3

One of the interesting things about reviewing movies for a long, long time is that certain franchises keep coming ’round on a regular schedule, like comets returning every few years. Here are some time-capsule looks at Godzilla pictures that orbited during my watch. Godzilla 1985 (published in The Herald, 1985) Thirty years ago, a monster was [...]