Starring: Sonney Weil, Bick Balse, Herb Hummel
For a long time, Japanese animation had a bad rep in America: “those freaky violent cartoons with the schoolgirls and the tentacle monsters.” UROTSUKIDŌJI: THE LEGEND OF OVERFIEND is the film that’s largely responsible for this reputation. A video store staple in America, Hideki Takayama’s gruesome adaptation of Toshio Maeda’s erotic horror comic had a brief stint in U.S. theaters rocking a well-earned NC-17 rating.
Grim-faced and grotesque, Urotsukidōji is a hellish Freudian vision of torn bodies, sexual depravity and bitter pessimism. The apocalyptic film picks up just before the prophesied rise of the demon-god The Overfiend, whose re-birth would merge the worlds of men and demons. As time of prophecy draws closer, demons flood into the dimension of men, throwing the Earth into a chaotic storm of sex and violence.
Starring: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weson, Biff McGuire
Release Date: June 19, 1968
Thomas Crown, a playboy bank executive, has just pulled off the perfect heist without getting his hands dirty. Using five men to steal a multi-million dollar haul from a Boston bank, Crown deposits the money bit-by-bit into a Swiss bank account. As Crown counts cash, a wily insurance investigator begins looking into the affair, buddying up to Crown in a relationship that soon turns physical.
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, John Fiedler, Herb Edelman, David Sheiner, Monica Evans, Carole Shelley
Release Date: May 2, 1968
“Following the collapse of his marriage, TV newswriter Felix Ungar decides to commit suicide in a cheap hotel room near Times Square. He fails at even this, however, and dejectedly makes his way to the weekly poker game being held at the Riverside Drive apartment of his best friend, Oscar Madison, a divorced sportswriter. Felix accepts an invitation to share the 8-room apartment, but his hypochondria and his compulsion for order and cleanliness drive the slovenly Oscar to distraction, and the two men are soon quarreling.” – American Film Institute
Starring: Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Paul Freeman
On the brink of forming a new business arrangement with a cabal of shady Americans, cockney mobster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) eyes the throne at the top of the London underworld until an explosion on Good Friday threatens to throw the deal off the rails. With twenty-four hours to put a lid on the underworld strife, Shand runs through the city leaving a trail of bloody mayhem as he tries to stomp out the insurgency.
Lawrence Kasdan’s tramped up and ruthless remix of Double Indemnity, sees a Florida heat-wave fry the brain of a dopey two-bit lawyer who falls into the trap of a bored and wealthy woman just out to pass the time while her husband’s out of town with a bit of a steamy affair. As the clothes shed and the days pass, a plot hatches to kill her husband and make off with his mountain of money. Dopey lawyer being what he is, goes for it; but one can hardly blame him, it’s for Kathleen Turner, after all.
Starring: Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Olivia Munn, Joe Manganiello
Loosely based on Channing Tatum’s days of banana hammocks and hurricane parties working as a stripper in Florida; Magic Mike went and surprised everyone by being a real, honest-t0-goodness movie. Headed up by Steven Soderbergh, the film follows Mike as he works the Tampa strip scene building up a nest egg to start a business of his own. The problem is he works under a club-owner named Dallas whose in the game more for himself than the health and well-being of his boys; and Mike finds himself in trouble when Dallas’s influence starts taking a toll on Mike’s young-buck protegee.
Starring: Timothy Dalton, Carey Lowell, Robert Davi, Talisa Soto, Everett McGill, Benicio Del Toro
A Central American drug lord snuffs out one of James Bond’s friends and the world’s most famous super secret agent isn’t having one bit of it. Vowing revenge, he breaks up with MI6 and heads down to Key West with vengeance on his mind.
Quite brutal for a Bond flick, License to Kill sets a mean-mugged Timothy Dalton up against an iguana-stroking, pinky-ringed kingpin played by Robert Davi. Critics thought it was mean – but they just can’t stand that Florida heat.
Starring: Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, Matt Dillon, Chris Elliott, Keith David
Having never fully recovered from a prom date that became a total disaster, a man finally gets a chance to reunite with his old prom date, only to run up against other suitors including the sleazy detective he hired to find her.
Starring: Neville Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Marilyn Burns, Robert Englund
Willfully weird and wonderfully bizarre – the bayou-tiful EATEN ALIVE is a rotting rose that by any other name is still way whacked-out! Claustrophobic and uncomfortable – unsettling and unrelenting – Hooper hops up his hallucinatory horror with garish glee. And the Japanese subtitles on this rare 35mm print only add to its peyote-drenched-dream otherworldliness…
Fresh off the breakout success of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, Hooper took his new-found fame and kinda fortune – with a bigger budget and an “all-star” cast – then served up this slice of sweaty shock-schlock insanity! Instead of going bigger and slicking things up, Hooper drives EATEN ALIVE head-first into a fantasia of fake-ness that veers near to the realm of Avant Guarde Theatre…Or the stuff of never ending nightmares!
Starring: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly
Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in “the Bathtub,” a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink’s tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe; for a time when he’s no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack—temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink’s health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.
