High School Musical A GUEST DISSERTATION (Part 3)
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High School Musical A GUEST DISSERTATION (Part 3)

ACT THREE We return from our commercial break to find Chad harassing Troy in the library.  Like Coach Bolton before him, he has decided to skip the best point he could possibly make -- that Troy needs to live up to his role as team captain -- and instead blame Gabriella for Troy’s bizarre…
High School Musical A GUEST DISSERTATION (Part 4)
Posted inReviews

High School Musical A GUEST DISSERTATION (Part 4)

ACT FIVE The next morning, Kelsi is staring glumly at the callback sheet, which has a new announcement to the effect that callbacks have been rescheduled as Sharpay requested.  All our non-Evans main characters walk in a nearby door.  When Troy and Gabriella notice the expression on their petite pianist’s face, they look at…
High School Musical A GUEST DISSERTATION (Part 5)
Posted inReviews

High School Musical A GUEST DISSERTATION (Part 5)

FIXING IT IN POST Admittedly, High School Musical is not exactly the normal fare round these parts.  If you’re one of Ken’s regular readers, you probably haven’t watched the movie.  But just from the clips scattered throughout this review, you can see it has halfway-decent pr`oduction values -- for TV, anyway -- and some…
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Our Man Flint: Dead On Target (1976)
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Our Man Flint: Dead On Target (1976)

[aesop_image imgwidth="800px" img="http://jabootu.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1Evo3Zm.png" align="center" lightbox="on" caption="DEAD ON ARRIVAL would have been a far more apt title." captionposition="center"] I was really unprepared for how lousy this was. Not only as a purported sequel to the two James Coburn films of the 1960s. No, I mean just how bad it is technically. I had known there…
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Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966)
Posted inB-Masters Cabal Reviews

Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966)

  John Carradine loved to act. Well, of course he did. Actors do, generally. However, John Carradine really loved to act. Born Richmond Reed Carradine, he redubbed his own name in homage to his friend and idol John Barrymore. Mr. Barrymore was both the greatest actor of his day and remains one of Hollywood’s…
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Fantomas III: The Murderous Corpse (1913)
Posted inB-Masters Cabal Reviews

Fantomas III: The Murderous Corpse (1913)

The further I get into things, the want to go into details. Surely interested readers will want to seek out the Fantômas set (perhaps through your local library) and give it a look for themselves. That said, this third film, the only one to follow a traditional cliffhanger, is easily the most morbid and…
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Fantomas II: Juve vs. Fantomas (1913)
Posted inB-Masters Cabal Reviews

Fantomas II: Juve vs. Fantomas (1913)

Click here to read about the previous film, Fantomas in the Shadow of the Guillotine. With our cast introduced in the first film, our second hour-long feature can hit the ground running. As the title indicates, our hero moves closer to center stage this time. Indeed, he’s joins Fantômas  with his own opening montage…
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Fantomas in the Shadow of the Guillotine (1913)
Posted inB-Masters Cabal Reviews

Fantomas in the Shadow of the Guillotine (1913)

Before there was Mabuse, there was Fantômas. The thing about movies is that they haven’t been around that long. Although a majority of the very earliest films are lost, you can still largely go back to the beginnings of cinema and see the foundations for the great art form of the 20th century being…
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Halloween (1978)
Posted inB-Masters Cabal Reviews

Halloween (1978)

I won’t embarrass myself by trying to express the sort of warm human emotions I have little facility for. I will simply note that the comradeship of the various members of the Cabal, past and present, through the last 15 years has been one of the great blessings of my life. To that can…
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Swept Away (2003)
Posted inB-Masters Cabal Reviews

Swept Away (2003)

In one obvious respect, Madonna is an atypical focus for this roundtable. She has, after all, starred or costarred in a dozen movies over the years. Not for her the route of, say, Tony Bennett in The Oscar, who gave a performance so famously awful that he never worked as an actor again. One…
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