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By Darren Allison

The Film Detective continues to thrill us with a couple of excellent cult classics. Frankenstein’s Daughter is a film that had been denied a great deal of exposure to fans of the strange and macabre. For many, it’s a title that has teased us for decades, with a still or a lobby card appearing once in a while by way of a horror book or a specialist periodical, so it is certainly welcome. It is typically what one would expect from this lush 1950s period. An incredibly low-budget affair, these films would often be produced for around $60,000, but the filmmakers certainly knew how to squeeze every ounce out of that budget. If anything, it ignited creativity and provided a lesson in how to make the most of the limited resources that were available to them.

Frankenstein’s Daughter is a fine example of that.

Hello, dear readers! To paraphrase a popular movie, “We’re in the Endgame now,” as Halloween is now merely only a few days away. If you’re looking for some last-minute viewing ideas to get you to the spooky season finish line, we definitely have a great array of choices heading home on Tuesday. The biggest recommendation that I can personally make in regard to perfect Halloween movie experiences is the Wnuf Halloween Special, which is getting a killer Blu-ray release tomorrow. Arrow Films is giving Dario Argento’s Deep Red a 4K upgrade this week, too, and Severin Films is showing love to both An Angel for Satan and Beyond Darkness.

Other releases for October 26th include Don’t Breathe 2, The Amazing Mr. X, Boardinghouse, Eye of the Devil, Skull: The Mask, Frankenstein’s Daughter, and Underworld: Limited Edition 5-Movie Collection.

The Amazing Mr. X: Special Edition

An atmospheric masterpiece,...

The Spiritualist is available now on VOD platforms, iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play, Xbox Video, Vimeo, Hoopla, Youtube, TerrorTV, ShiverTV, Flix Fling, Tubi, and The Cult Movie Network, courtesy of Midnight Releasing. Synopsis: Laura, suffering horrific night terrors and sleep paralysis, believes the sinister spirit haunting her is the ghost of her mother. Scared and …

The post ‘The Spiritualist’ Now Haunting On VOD from Midnight Releasing appeared first on Horror News | Hnn.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1944/ 87 min.

Starring Maria Montez, Jon Hall

Cinematography by George Robinson

Directed by Arthur Lubin

Thanks to George Robinson’s Technicolor photography and Vera West’s kaleidoscopic costumes, death and destruction look pretty as a picture in 1944’s Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Director Arthur Lubin’s action fantasy is no patch on the Fleischer brothers’ Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves but this Universal Pictures release is a cheerfully unassuming time-killer.

This Arabian Nights fable about a caliph’s son who grows up to lead a band of robbers contains a few nuggets of actual history; the movie’s bloodthirsty villain, Hulagu Khan, was indeed the grandson of the infamous Genghis. Hulagu was a thug who didn’t fall far from the tree; he conquered Baghdad and then decimated it, sending the then storybook city into a spiral.

Okay, it's not earth-shaking, but So Young, So Bad (1950) kept me watching, sometimes goggling. It's the penultimate film of quota quickie master Bernard "Mad" Vorhaus, who made cheap and often very skilled work in the U.K., moved to the U.S. and made The Amazing Mr. X, a really stylish and entertaining thriller shot by the great John Alton, then made this, and got blacklisted the following year. He had already left the U.S., having seen the way the wind was blowing, but aside from shooting second unit on William Wyler's Roman Holiday, Vorhaus made only one more movie, an Italian flick called Finishing School which seems to be impossible to get at present. He went into house renovation back in the U.K. and did alright at it, I believe.So, one doesn't necessarily expect earth-shaking from a B-movie talent like Vorhaus, but he was capable of splendid work,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

BAMcinématek

This is the final weekend for marathon screenings of Out 1. We highly recommend taking the plunge.

Museum of the Moving Image

“Lonely Places: Film Noir and the American Landscape” highlights a different atmosphere of the noir picture, and it makes its case with some great films. Out of the Past shows on Friday; Saturday...

The Amazing Mr. X (a.k.a. The Spiritualist)

Written by Crane Wilbur and Muriel Roy Bolton

Directed by Bernard Vorhaus

USA, 1948

Christine (Lynn Bari), widowed for two years, steps out one night on her bedroom balcony overlooking the nearby rocky cliffs and ocean. Something compels her towards the violent waters,, a voice, that of her late husband Paul. Her younger sister Janet (Cathy O’Donnell) gently reminds Christine that more than enough time has elapsed for her to rebuild her life, especially with Martin (Richard Carlson), affable and loving, trying to win her heart. A few nights later, Christine even makes the trek down to the beach where a raspy voice unmistakably calls out her name. To her surprise, a lone gentleman named Alexis (Turhan Bey) is lurking the premises and introduces himself as a spiritualist interested in her case. Tempted by the idea of contacting her dead husband,...

Vienna -- Turhan Bey, an actor whose exotic good looks earned him the nickname of "Turkish Delight" in films with Errol Flynn and Katherine Hepburn before he left Hollywood for a quieter life in Vienna, has died. He was 90.

Marita Ruiter, who exhibited Bey's photos in her Luxembourg gallery, told the Austria Press Agency on Tuesday that Bey died in the Austrian capital on Sept. 30 after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease and was cremated on Monday.

While celebrated for supporting roles alongside Flynn, Hepburn, John Wayne, Peter Lorre and other film greats of the 1940s, friends described Bey as a modest, unassuming man who never bragged of his ties with the stars of the era.

"He was a man brimming with humor, with plenty of aplomb and self-irony, and was very popular," Ruiter was quoted as saying. "He wasn't the kind who cared a lot about honors."

Born in Austria as Gilbert Selahettin Schultavey,...

Above: Publicity still from John Parker's Dementia (1955).

Rep houses in San Francisco, like those in most American cities, are struggling to stay open. But for something like thirty nights a year, the clouds lift and big crowds materialize for films of the past: call it the noir exception. To be sure, one needn’t actually attend the Film Noir Foundation’s annual Noir City festival at the Castro or Elliot Lavine’s grittier programs at the Roxie to know that the generic fantasy of film noir (style, sex and violence washed together) still holds powerful allure. You could hardly miss the bus stop advert for Rockstar Games’ latest blockbuster, L.A. Noire, outside the Roxie during Lavine’s latest marathon, “I Wake Up Dreaming: The Legendary and the Lost”. For those of us still invested in the non-interactive cinema experience, however, the popularity of these series is a remarkable if curious thing.