Danger: Diabolik was Bava’s first and only big budget film. He had been used to making $50,000 films. Here, Dino De Laurentiis gave him $3 million to work with. Bava left $2.6 million on the table. Since his forte had long been using camera trickery and special effects to bring …
As I watched Danger: Diabolik, I thought that hitchhiking scene looked very similar to something from a Heavy Metal comic strip from my degenerate youth. Not a direct copy, but a similar idea.
Today I was fortunate to get a DVD copy of Diabolik through interlibrary loan, with commentary …
For this week’s Crime Time Radio, I was going to go with a crime and punishment theme, but I ended up taking a song of hanging, Led Zeppelin’s Gallows Pole, and looking at its ancestry and variants. It’s commonly traced back to The Maid Freed from the Gallows, and …
We had a morning edition of the BavaFilmFest today, discussing Kill, Baby… Kill!. I said a little about the Hitchcock connection before, but today Jim brought up similarities to The Shining which hadn’t even occurred to me, being as dense as I am. He also brought in some …
Our friend Talky Tina challenged us to make something nicer with flowers. I thought this lonely garbage can could use some brightening up. A few flower decals should help. Now it looks much happier, don’t you think?…
Next in line on the Bava film fest is Kill, Baby… Kill! - Operazione paura (Operation Fear) in Italian, and known in Germany as Die Toten Augen Des Dr. Dracula (The Dead Eyes of Dr. Dracula). Bava’s titles frequently played off of other films of the day. The American title …
I had this idea to do a crime themed radio show for some time now, since the #Hardboiled course almost a year ago. There’s a lot of fodder out there, from murder ballads to ganster rap to bizarre compilation albums. But having just worked my way through The Stranger …
So we finally got back on track with the Bava film fest. I was woefully underprepared but remembered a little of what I had blogged about before. And we tried, with a couple false starts, a different recording method. I’m sure it all shows, but hey, at least …
This collection of Poes came to my attention the other week, and I thought it was missing a few. Like Edgar Allan Joe (with Kung Fu Grip!)
Edgar Allan Joe
Edgar Allan Coe might be a little obscure for some
Edgar Allan Coe
but surely there could be an Edgar …
I was in a Starbucks the other day and thought of this assignment while I was waiting in front of the bottled water display. I was trying to think of how it could be turned into a commercial, using “At least it’s an Ethos!” as the slogan. But I didn’t …
I saw this assignment and thought of those old cartoons where the characters try to outrun a rolling boulder. But The Breeders are cooler. The problem was that the ball is rolling away from the camera. So I took 13 frames of the rolling ball, manually reordered them (not thinking …
