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1939 is often called Hollywood’s Greatest Year, and it is indisputable that a huge number of America’s greatest classics were produced in that single year. A usually ignored element of that greatness is that 1939 was also the year that Hollywood resumed production on horror films after a two-year pause. In late 1936 two major factors led to the practical death of the genre: the Laemmle family, of whom Carl Laemmle’s, Jr. was horror’s greatest advocate, lost control of Universal and the British Board of Censors began enforcing the “H” certificate, which for all practical purposes banned horror for its target audience in Britain. The loss of this lucrative market combined with dropping box-office receipts and mounting pressure from American religious groups, Hollywood saw no reason to continue producing horror. The phrase “horror is dead” has often been thrown around over the decades but in 1937 and 38, it was actually true.

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“Is You In There, Zombie?”

By Raymond Benson

There are a handful of Hollywood movies out there that successfully combined comedy with the horror genre. Surprisingly, truly good ones are few and far between. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) is perhaps the quintessential example of the genre mashup. It provided genuine thrills and some frights mixed in with hilarious comedic bits. A more recent one that comes to mind is of course the 1984 megahit, Ghostbusters. There is no question that this Bill Murray vehicle owes a great deal to the 1940 romp, The Ghost Breakers, considered one of Bob Hope’s most beloved early pictures.

Based on the 1909 stage play, The Ghost Breaker, by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard, the 1940 movie is actually a remake of previous adaptations. Both Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred E. Green made silent films of the play in 1914 and 1922, respectively,...

The Cat and the Canary

& The Ghost Breakers

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1939, 1940 / 72, 83 min.

Starring Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard

Cinematography by Charles B. Lang

Directed by Elliott Nugent, George Marshall

Bob Hope’s brand of comedy may have been extinct by the sixties but it was alive and kicking in the pages of God Save the Mark, Donald E. Westlake’s comic crime novel about a schnook on the run for a murder he didn’t commit. Published in 1967, Westlake’s farce resembles one of Hope’s own movies; the pace is frenetic and the patter is as snappy as the comedian’s in his prime—a golden age exemplified by his one-two punch from 1939 and 1940, The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers. Those films present Hope in excelsis but in the hands of directors Elliott Nugent and George Marshall they serve as master classes in the tricky art of the scare comedy.

We’ve got a big week of home media releases ahead of us, so I hope that your wallets are ready to suffer a whole lot of abuse this Tuesday, because there are a ton of must-own titles headed home that genre fans are definitely going to want to add to their collections. We have two new Vestron Video Collector’s Series releases to look forward to—David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Little Monsters (1989)—and for the first time ever, Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn is being released on Blu-ray.

If you’re a Stephen King fan, Paramount has assembled a 5-Movie Collection on Blu that includes both iterations of Pet Sematary, Silver Bullet, The Stand, and The Dead Zone. Kl Studio Classics is showing some love this Tuesday to the horror comedy The Ghost Breakers featuring Bob Hope, and Dark Sky Films is set to release Luz: The Flower of Evil this week,...

The Paleface

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1948 / 91 min.

Starring Bob Hope, Jane Russell

Cinematography by Ray Rennahan

Directed by Norman Z. McLeod

In 1934 Al Christie directed Going Spanish, a 19 minute farce billed as “An Educational Musical Comedy.” The movie is notable only for the film debut of Bob Hope whose wisecracks about the movie’s incompetence provoked Christie to cancel the comedian’s contract. Another filmmaker made his mark with the irascible producer too—Norman Z. McLeod got his feet wet working as title cartoonist for a series of silent films known as Christie’s Comedies. Pretty soon McLeod would be dealing with funny men in the flesh; W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye and Hope himself. He would direct—and with those particular artists, “manage” might be a more appropriate term—some of the greatest comedies to emerge from the studio system.

McLeod’s technique, a hands-off approach that was the opposite of showy,...

Destry Rides Again

Blu ray

Criterion

1939 / 1.33:1/ 95 min.

Starring Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart

Cinematography by Hal Mohr

Directed by George Marshall

America’s favorite boy next door meets the Weimar Republic’s preeminent vamp in George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again. James Stewart plays Tom Destry, the self-effacing straight-shooter who cleans up a lawless backwater burg without firing a shot – almost. Marlene Dietrich is Frenchy, a world-weary chanteuse who rules the roost at the town’s only waterhole, the Last Chance saloon. Their relationship is more heated than the volatile town itself but after the final punch is thrown their bond is deeper than any typical Hollywood romance.

Marshall’s comic horse opera was released by Universal in 1939 and like so many of that studio’s horror films of the era, it opens with a slow pan over a moonlit graveyard with more than its fair share of tombstones. Instead...

Red Skelton Whistling Collection

DVD

Warner Archive

1941, 42, 43 / 1:33:1 / 78, 74, 87 Min.

Starring Red Skelton, Ann Rutherford

Written by Robert MacGunigle, Nat Perrin

Cinematography by Sidney Wagner, Clyde De Vinnam, Lester White

Directed by S. Sylvan Simon

One night in 1950 during an especially frenetic episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour, Jerry Lewis stepped away from Dean Martin to address the camera point blank – “You get the idea – I’m supposed to be a 9-year-old kid.” Hardly a revelation – especially to Red Skelton, the reigning king of prepubescent horseplay.

That reign was begun in 1923 and fueled by broadly played gags that were both leering and infantile – like a burlesque version of The Bad Seed. One of Skelton’s most grating characters was a wisecracking brat called the “mean widdle kid” – wearing short pants and lace collar while delivering grown-up one-liners in baby talk he was a less feral version of Joe Besser’s...

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

Blu ray

Twilight Time

1969 / 1:85 / 105 Min. / Street Date January 29, 2018

Starring Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Elliot Gould, Dyan Cannon

Cinematography by Charles Lang

Written by Paul Mazursky, Larry Tucker

Music by Quincy Jones

Edited by Stuart H. Pappé

Produced by M.J. Frankovich, Larry Tucker

Directed by Paul Mazursky

John Updike and Philip Roth, those faithful chroniclers of American infidelity, had a kindred spirit in director Paul Mazursky. Employing a double-edged sword tempered with Updike’s Protestant angst and Roth’s hair-shirt humor, Mazursky served up 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a shrewd and ultimately compassionate satire about lovelorn narcissists.

As it stumbled toward that decade’s finish line, 1969 found much of the counterculture in pursuit of a new Age of Aquarius (Fonda and Hopper were famously “searching for America” in that same year’s Easy Rider). Self help centers servicing those troubled souls began to spring up...

You pick up a lot of baggage when you live to be 100, a sentiment confirmed by the long, long movie career of Bob Hope. His unofficial status as the preeminent entertainer of the 20th century is open to debate but he was without a doubt that era’s most conspicuous comedian. Marlon Brando’s infamous dismissal, “He’ll go to the opening of a market to receive an award”, was mean-spirited but it had the sting of truth; for over eighty years Hope was everywhere, for better or worse.

Living up to his nickname, “Rapid Robert”, the 31-year old Hope shot out of the gate in 1934 with a series of quick-on-their feet comic shorts revolving around his unique presence as a leading man and comical sidekick rolled into one. It wasn’t long before he was starring in pleasantly prosaic musicals like The Big Broadcast of 1938 and handsomely mounted...

A history of paranormal exterminators in pop culture pre-1984.

Anytime you have a remake or reboot of a popular movie or franchise, fans of the original are going to whine about it. With Ghostbusters, there’s a new level of objection, some of it stemming from the same sort of nostalgic ownership of any beloved property from childhood and some of it arising out of misogyny. The only thing they ought to be concerned with is whether or not fans of the new movie will recognize its roots. And that’s not exclusive to the 1984 movie it’s based on and its 1989 sequel, Ghostbusters II.

The Ghost Busters

Most famously, there was already something titled The Ghost Busters, a live-action TV series for children that ran for 15 episodes in 1975 and featured two men and a gorilla hunting mostly spirits and also sometimes famous monsters like Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein’s Creature. The...

Lizabeth Scott dead at 92: Film noir star of the '40s and '50s Lizabeth Scott, a Paramount star in the 1940s usually cast as film noir heroines, died of congestive heart failure on Jan. 31, 2015, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Scott, born (as Emma Matzo) on Sept. 29, 1922, was 92. (See also: Lizabeth Scott photo at recent The Strange Love of Martha Ivers screening.) Among the two dozen film featuring Lizabeth Scott – whose hair-style and husky line delivery were clearly inspired by Paramount's own Veronica Lake (along with Warner Bros.' Lauren Bacall) – were the following: John Farrow's You Came Along (1945), with Robert Cummings. Lewis Milestone's The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), with Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, and Kirk Douglas. Desert Fury (1947), with Burt Lancaster. Dead Reckoning (1947), with Humphrey Bogart. Pitfall (1948), with Dick Powell. Dark City (1950), with Charlton Heston. The Racket (1951), with Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum.

I wanted to post something truly terrifying for Halloween this year—the first year I believe that Halloween has fallen on a Movie Poster of the Week Friday since I started—but then I came across this beautiful Boris Grinsson poster. Tu Trembles, Carcasse..., which translates very inelegantly as “You are trembling, corpse” is the French title for the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy horror musical Scared Stiff, which was the 8th of their sixteen collaborations (or 9th of their seventeen if you include their cameo in the Road to Bali, a gag appearance that was reciprocated by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Scared Stiff). Scared Stiff was actually a 1953 remake of a 1940 Bob Hope film The Ghost Breakers, made by the same director, George Marshall, and it was made at the height of Martin & Lewis’s success, when they were the biggest double-act in America. It was...

One of my fondest memories growing up as a young horrorphile was catching as many scary movies and fright-filled specials as I could during the month of October in order to prepare for Halloween night. With the hundreds of channel options out there for viewers these days, I thought it might be fun to break down where genre fans can catch various movies, specials and even Halloween-themed cartoons over the next 31 days so that you can start planning out your viewings in advance.

Here are some of the thrills and chills coming to your televisions this October. Please keep in mind that full schedules have not been announced everywhere yet, so we’ll be sure to update you guys with any additions to the calendar. All times listed are Et/Pt:

Wednesday, October 1st

2:00pm – The Dead (SyFy)

4:30pm – Dead Season (SyFy)

6:30pm – Halloween II (2009) (SyFy)

9:...

‘The Cat and the Canary’ 1939: Paulette Goddard / Bob Hope haunted house comedy among Halloween 2013 movies at Packard Theater There’s much to recommend among the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus and State Theater screenings in Culpeper, Virginia, in October 2013, including the until recently super-rare Bob Hope / Paulette Goddard haunted house comedy The Cat and the Canary (1939). And that’s one more reason to hope that the Republican Party’s foaming-at-the-mouth extremists (and their voters and supporters), ever bent on destroying the economic and sociopolitical fabric of the United States (and of the rest of the world), will not succeed in shutting down the federal government and thus potentially wreak havoc throughout the U.S. and beyond. (Photo: Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in The Cat and the Canary.) Screening on Thursday, October 31, at the Packard Theater, Elliott Nugent’s The Cat and the Canary is a remake of Paul Leni...

Today sees the opening of "The Cabin In The Woods," one of the freshest, most enjoyable horror movies in years, one that we can only urge you to go see (read our review here). To mark its release, Time Out have polled critics, programmers and filmmakers as to their favorite horror movies, and collated their finds in a mammoth list.

Topped by "The Exorcist," it's an excellent read, and one you'll want to sit down with over the weekend, and as a taste, below you can find the top ten picks of ten of the most notable filmmaker contributors. You can find the full list, as well as picks from many, many more interesting figures, from Antonio Campos and Joe Dante to Simon Pegg and Rob Zombie, over at Time Out's site. And why not weigh in with your own ten picks over in the comments below?

Roger Corman ("The Pit & The Pendulum,...

Release Date: Dec. 6, 2011

Price: Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Michael Redgrave (l.) and Margaret Lockwood do some investigating in The Lady Vanishes.

It’s great to see Alfred Hitchcock’s (Psycho) quick-witted and devilish 1938 comedy-thriller The Lady Vanishes get the Criterion treatment.

In the movie, beautiful Margaret Lockwood (Night Train to Munich) is traveling across Europe by train when she meets a charming spinster (Dame May Whitty, Suspicion), who then seems to disappear into thin air. The younger woman turns investigator and finds herself drawn into a complex web of mystery, adventure and even some romance.

Co-starring Michael Redgrave (The Browning Version) and Paul Lukas (The Ghost Breakers), The Lady Vanishes remains an audience favorite and one of the great filmmaker’s purest delights.

Criterion’s Blu-ray edition offers a high-definition digital restoration of the classic film with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack.

There are a number of bonus features on the Blu-ray...

Paulette Goddard wouldn't have a special place in the Pantheon of movie stars if it hadn't been for her close personal and professional association with Charles Chaplin, with whom she co-starred in Modern Times and The Great Dictator. That's not only unfortunate, but downright unfair. After all, besides being beautiful, charming, lively, a former Ziegfeld girl, an Academy Award nominee (in the Best Supporting Actress category) for So Proudly We Hail, and a top contender for the role of Gone with the Wind's Scarlett O'Hara, Paulette Goddard was a major box-office attraction in the 1940s and, in the right role and under the right guidance, could be a remarkably effective actress. And let's not forget her eclectic taste in husbands — Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, Erich Maria Remarque, and millionaire businessman Edgar James; her leaving $20 million to New York University at the time of her death in 1990; and her firm — and...