Leading off with fiery credits in the color of cheddar cheese and a whip-cracking parody of Frankie Laine's Rawhide theme song, Mel Brooks bursts onto the Western plains; but the terrain gives way, unpredictably, and opens up to allow any whim: a street brawl that spills across the Warner Brothers …
Mention her name, and anyone who has seen Blazing Saddles will smile and say, “That’s Hedley!” But if it was Mel Brooks who brought the actress eternal fame and instant recognition, Bombshell is out to set the record straight. At 18, actress Hedy Lamarr grabbed headlines when she appeared nude …
Certainly not the only, but perhaps the single greatest, exception to the rule about sequels never surpassing their forerunners. A lively and densely packed hour and a quarter, overrun by an unsuppressed sense of humor, it begins with a one-stormy-night prologue in which the story is resumed by Mary Shelley …
A copy of The Comeback Trail has been lounging on my hard drive for going on four months now. This week, temptation finally got the best of me. George Gallo rocketed out of the gate with such propulsion that his feet never touched down. He scripted Brian De Palma’s underrated …
Mostly tired vampire spoof, but pleasantly so, contentedly so, not ill-humoredly so. The fast-moving and soon-ending storyline confines itself to the various versions of the Bram Stoker prototype, and doesn't wander off on discursive side trips. The cast has plenty of fun with the accents, British, German, and Lugosian (Peter …
A flaky French pastry molded around a twenty-two-year-old suicidal gamine and the middle-aged professional knife-thrower who recruits her (from the bottom of the Seine) as his nothing-to-lose assistant. Or in another word, target. The capering camera, when it can manage to sit still (when it is not, for example, buzzing …
The lively undead. Yes, that's the legendary Mel Brooks you hear lending his voice to Great-Grandpa Vlad in director Genndy Tartakovsky's sequel to his human boy-meets-monster girl romantic comedy for kids, Hotel Transylvania. Maybe that explains the relentless, unending, benumbing avalanche of gags (visual and otherwise), puns, and one-liners — …
Sony’s episodic, dialogue-driven, animated series on vampirism for youngsters rolls on with a third installment, this one set aboard a 20-story ocean liner. Hideous background and character design ahead, captain: the animation is so claustrophobic, one would swear that it was filmed entirely on a Hollywood soundstage. Were those Gremlins …
Sony’s episodic, dialogue-driven, animated series on vampirism for youngsters rolls on with a third installment, this one set aboard a 20-story ocean liner. Hideous background and character design ahead, captain: the animation is so claustrophobic, one would swear that it was filmed entirely on a Hollywood soundstage. Were those Gremlins …
The note of campiness, carried over from the previous Spielberg-Lucas collaboration, is sounded here first thing, and with full Bette Midleresque force: the Paramount logo fades into a bas-relief design on a Chinese gong (joke), and the camera moves over from that to the smoking mouth of a papier-mâché dragon …
Marty Feldman, making his directorial debut, borrows heavily from others (especially from Mel Brooks, whose fervent love of old movies drives him to rape and pillage them), and he borrows from himself as well (once he uses a joke, he is more than likely to use it again). If he …
As near to philosophy as Mel Brooks gets: "It's good to be alive. There are so many things you can't do when you're dead." The richest man in the world (Brooks himself) takes a bet to live among, and as, the homeless, and acquires there a new set of values, …
In the 1968 animated short The Critic, befuddled audience member Mel Brooks offers the abstract filmmaker a bit of off-camera advice: “Do something constructive. Make a shoe.” Better yet, make a documentary about a shoemaker. Dubbed “the Emperor of Shoes,” highest-priced cobbler Manolo Blahnik is the subject of this lighthearted …
Strictly for kids, and the younger the better. The simplicity of the images, the queer lunar lighting, and the 3-D-ish, split-level compositions give you the feeling of looking at a View-Master rather than at a movie. Jim Henson's dead-eyed puppets are pretty uninteresting as shapes and colors, and no matter …
Strictly for kids, and the younger the better. The simplicity of the images, the queer lunar lighting, and the 3-D-ish, split-level compositions give you the feeling of looking at a View-Master rather than at a movie. Jim Henson's dead-eyed puppets are pretty uninteresting as shapes and colors, and no matter …