List Price: $19.97 Our Price: $17.97YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
DVD Freaks
Tod Browning, who directed Bela Lugosi in the original Dracula, stepped into even eerier territory with this 1932 story of betrayal and retribution in the circus. Evil trapeze artist Olga Baclanova seduces and marries a midget in the circus sideshow, hoping to inherit his wealth. But in doing so, she has crossed the wrong folks: the tightly knit group of nature's aberrations, who stick together like family--and who set out to avenge their little pal. Browning brought in some of the most famous sideshow attractions of the era, include Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton and Johnny Eck the Legless Boy, as well as Zip and Pip, microcephalics whose appearance in this film inspired cartoonist Bill Griffith to create his comic strip, "Zippy the Pinhead." So disturbing that it was banned for 30 years in Great Britain. --Marshall Fine
When you consider that this film, actually a type of
"historical documentation" of the world of human anomalies (Freaks of the sideshow), was made in 1932, it's a 5-Star on the single merit that someone had the guts to commit the images to film. - That "someone" being Tod Browning, the producer, (of "Dracula" fame). When you view it, you won't wonder why it was banned for many years - you'll know!.
It is impossible to look away when you see the "pinheads", the "half-man", the "living torso", and all the sideshow attractions as they were. The scene around the "marriage table", is only trumped by the scene when the freaks converge on Hercules - and perhaps the "Trump Card" is the fate of the beautiful trapeze artist, and her introduction to the Freak's world - A fate she juslty deserves.
It is no wonder why this extraordinary film was selected to the National Film Registry's archive of cinematic treasures.
A cult classic!
The glorious masterpiece is a true real nightmare. We end to forget the presence of human beings who live in the dark side of the world. Browning with all the possible realism, shows us the low corners of the human depravation, somewhat it makes us to reflect around the adequate place where the pretended ugliness of the soul habits: are they or on the contrary the sickness triviality of office mercenaries who get some undeniable profits with the morbid exhibition masked beneath the title of entertaining?
This terrifying vision around of life and times of weird inhabitants of the sideshow world can shock you; Browning does not employ any special effects; they are real freaks; so the visual impact is even higher than you may expect. I have not had any other reference of his approach 's horror until the entry of Herzog in 1969 with "Even dwarfs started small" and lately with David Lynch 's "Eraser head" and "The elephant man."
Not recommended for squeamish.
Gooble Gobble
Tod Browning's Freaks is one of those movies that you never forget. It is a classic cult film, as its subject matter (circus freaks) could be seen as controversial, and the mainstream audience surely wouldn't find it to be entertaining. This film, like the earlier ones we saw in class, does not shoot for the mainstream, but goes along with a vision the director and the writers saw.
Even though this film is considered to be one of the best ever made, the mainstream audience wouldn't accept it, and I love it. I think that it was not accepted at the time because of people's extremely tight morals and religious beliefs. In today's world, where people have come to their senses and have begun to enjoy life, the movie is quite tame (though still disturbing to see the many deformities of nature). I agree that it is one of the best films ever made, or at least that I have seen. It is extremely memorable. For the past week, I haven't been able to get the song out of my head ("Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept her, we accept her. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble one of us, one of us.")
"A basket full of kisses for a basket full of hugs." Those are chilling words, at least when uttered by that ice princess, Patty McCormack. As Rhoda Penmark, she is as pretty as a porcelain doll but drips venom with each curtsey and polite response. Little Rhoda's mother is terrified she has passed on her own mother's corruption. Oops, turns out she's right. This passes the test of time, as it still gets under your skin. The character development is tight and the story very involving. Not even Freddy Krueger had the ability to scare like tiny McCormack, looking just like a little adult while she literally beats out the competition for a penmanship award. However, director Mervyn LeRoy's hands were tied over the ending, which was changed from the source material--Maxwell Anderson's hit... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Nancy Kelly - Patricia McCormack Director(s): Mervyn LeRoy DVD Release Date: Released the 10 August 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $17.97YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $8.98YOU SAVE $6!
Buy it
For a knock-out combination of timeless entertainment and vintage studio history, you can't do much better than The Warner Brothers Gangsters Collection. In the 1930s and '40s, Paramount specialized in glossy comedies, MGM popularized lavish musicals, Universal produced signature horror classics, and Fox scored hits with sophisticated dramas. But it was Warner Bros. that generated controversy--if not always box-office profits--with so-called "social problem" films, and that meant gangsters. When viewed in their pre- and post-Prohibition context and in chronological order (Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, 1931; The Petrified Forest, 1936; Angels With Dirty Faces, 1938; The Roaring Twenties, 1939; White Heat, 1949), these six films... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): James Cagney - Humphrey Bogart - Edward G. Robinson DVD Release Date: Released the 25 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $68.92 Your Price: $55.14YOU SAVE $13.78!
Buy it
What's scarier than scary kids? Village of the Damned is the definitive scary-kid classic, a truly unsettling film drawn from John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The brilliant opening sequence depicts the sudden and temporary paralysis of a small English hamlet, which is followed by the town's women becoming mysteriously pregnant. The spawn of this occurrence are a dozen eerie, blond-headed children, who are either gifted, evil, or "the world's new people." A splendid outing, not least in the way it catches parental anxiety about this small new stranger in one's home. (It was remade by John Carpenter in 1995.)
Children of the Damned follows up with a story about six more creepy kids, brought from all over the globe to huddle in a old church in London. An... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): George Sanders - Barbara Shelley Director(s): Wolf Rilla DVD Release Date: Released the 10 August 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.97 Your Price: $13.47YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
The long-awaited emergence of Nightmare Alley into the light of DVD should achieve two things: make a legendary film noir available to a new generation, and restore the horrific charge to the lately watered-down term geek, a concept that once had the power to give people very bad dreams indeed.
To his lasting credit, Tyrone Power--20th Century Fox's extraordinarily handsome but not terribly interesting star of the '30s and '40s--begged for the chance to play Stan Carlisle, the predatory charmer who snakes his way through this bracingly unwholesome story. A spieler for--and lover of--carnival mind reader Zeena (Joan Blondell), he displays uncanny skill at "reading" the susceptible rubes, including a tough sheriff who turns to jelly after Stan psychs him out. Once Stan's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Tyrone Power - Joan Blondell - Coleen Gray Director(s): Edmund Goulding DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $11.98YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
