What is it: It’s not exactly a household name, but in certain circles, it’s the holy bible of cheesy kung-fu schlock. Master of the Flying Guillotine is a 1976 Taiwanese film written by, directed by and starring Jimmy Wang Yu, a sequel to his One-Armed Boxer (about… you guessed it). It’s one of the wackiest kung fu movies of the ‘70s, featuring an insane blind assassin and his fearsome “flying guillotine” (a bizarre weapon which resembles a bladed cap attached to a chain. You throw it and boom, instant haircut). The guillotine master has a mad-on for the famed one-armed boxer who killed his students, and the entire movie is basically an excuse for inventive, crazed kung fu revenge ultraviolence, leading to a fantastic showdown between a one-armed fighter and a blind guillotine wielder.
Why I never saw it: Hell, I’d never even heard of it until recently, when I’ve been going on an extended martial arts movie binge, from the classic moves of Bruce Lee to the slapstick antics of Jackie Chan to the cool charms of Donnie Yen.
Does it measure up to its rep? This is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movies and a clear influence on his “Kill Bill” series. It’s not slick, but its clunky moves (the ‘one-armed boxer’ moves about as smooth as I do on a Saturday morning), crazy krautrock-influenced soundtrack and bizarre characters make it unforgettable in a genre filled with wacky kung-fu killers. While Wang Yu is a kinda stiff leading man, Lung Kun Lee as the guillotine killer is fascinatingly over-the-top – with facial hair that makes him resemble a rabid woodchuck, a snarling theme song that announces his entrance, and a penchant for throwing explosives around every building he enters, he’s amazing. The entire movie stops dead at one point for a half-hour of so of a bloody, murder-filled martial arts tournament featuring crazily baroque fighters, which basically plays like “Mortal Kombat” invented 20 years earlier. There’s sheer energy to the way this revenge tale is framed that gives it a kick. Perhaps the best way to watch is it like I did, on a low-rent dubbed video which inexplicably switches back to Chinese 5-6 times during the middle of the movie for a few lines here and there. It’s like I was there in the grindhouse drive-in movie theatre parking lot of 1976 this movie was made for.
How’s it different than I thought: Unlike the other “flying guillotine” movies out there in this sub-sub genre, this is pretty bloodless. In fact, a couple of the marquee decapitations in this flick are like watching an abandoned puppet go down, made funnier because in one scene you can clearly see the “headless man” is a man with his still-attached head stuffed into an extra-large shirt. And we won’t even talk about how the “one-armed boxer” is clearly hiding his arm in his tunic in almost every scene.
Worth seeing? Absolutely. It’s the kind of kung-fu insanity I dreamed about as a lad, and a hidden gem if you haven’t discovered its sloppy charms yet.
A good film festival is like a church for its acolytes – a place to find solace and enlightenment, to forget your troubles and to imagine exciting new possibilities in life.
No wonder I can’t stop thinking about movies. It’s a kaleidoscope of cinema every year – in past years I’ve seen grand revivals of Sergio Leone movies, silent classics like “Nosferatu” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic, enigmatic Russian epics which demand to be seen on a gaping big screen.
I joined a crowd of hundreds to cringe, scream and laugh last night at the premiere of NZ filmmaker 
The movie begins and ends with sepia tones, homaging an imagined western past that America has fetishised for decades. But in between “Butch Cassidy” is a determinedly modern movie, with Joss Whedon-worthy jokes being cracked left and right by Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Rather than the stoic masculine glares of an Eastwood or John Wayne, you’ve got Paul Newman’s motormouth Butch, whose first act of violence in the film isn’t a grim showdown – it’s kicking someone in the nuts. Meanwhile, Robert Redford’s Sundance Kid is the more traditional hero of the two, but he still shows cracks in his western hero facade.
“Butch Cassidy” is one of those pivotal movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s that forever cracked the old of the traditional heroic figure. The reason it still seems so relaxed today is that we’ve been surrounded by Butch and his offspring for years. Long may they ride.
What is it: The world’s most famous demonic possession story, the 1973 horror classic 
It makes what follows later that much more profane and shocking. And the movie’s most iconic moments – the possession of Regan and her gruesome actions – are still truly horrifying today. Every parent of a teenager has that moment of disconnection when your child suddenly seems like an alien to you, and “The Exorcist” dramatises that perfectly to terrible extremes.
Thirty years ago today, I was standing in a line. A bunch of us were all queued up for what was then the biggest comic book movie of all time, Tim Burton’s Batman.
It’s hard to explain to fans of today’s slick, streamlined and gorgeous Marvel Universe movies that seeing a comic book movie in the ‘80s and ‘90s was mostly a matter of lowering expectations, of accepting flaws and looking for the bits that worked.
But Keaton’s Batman has only grown in strength over the years. He never quite has the classic physical profile – seen in a tuxedo in an early scene, his Bruce Wayne’s shoulders would barely fill half the Bat-suit – but acting is often concentrated in the eyes, and Keaton’s eyes hold a balance of resolve and regret. His Bruce Wayne seems closer to the edge than some – look at the scene where he takes on the Joker in his civilian clothes: “You want nuts? Let’s get nuts!” In contrast, his Batman is more of a blank, grim slate, a mask that wipes out Wayne’s humanity and focuses his mission.
I’ve seen three of the Monkees live now, and I’m happy to have done so. But there was one last Monkee fan hurdle for me to cross: Their mysterious, controversial 1968 movie “Head,” which is either their finest moment or their nadir, depending on who you ask.
Hey, hey, we are The Monkees / You know we love to please / A manufactured image / With no philosophies.
I have a bizarre fascination with the bad movies of 
I’ve been making my way as a kind of punishing completist chore through the most obscure of Sellers’ oeuvre, movies that are barely remembered today. Sellers was a difficult, demon-haunted man, whose talent was crippled by bad health and serious psychological issues (there’s the famous quote “There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed,” which more than anything sums up the man).
And I am absolutely dying to see the new documentary
There’s a kernel of something golden in even his worst movies. His Fu Manchu is objectively a racist joke played far too long, but there’s a strange sadness Sellers summons up between the lame puns in his portrayal of an immortal villain.
I’ve written 
But her biggest claim to glory today is that she designed the epic look of the Creature From The Black Lagoon. The Creature is, I’d argue, the second-best monster design of all time (sorry, but Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster has to take the top crown). It’s alien, yet human; terrifying, yet captivating.
In “Lagoon,” O’Meara also shows the hard work that goes into the biography of a somewhat obscure person, hunting down leads and tracing dusty steps in the past. The story is as much about her and her experiences as a young woman in Hollywood as it is about Milicent Patrick. Some of the anecdotes O’Meara tells of her own treatment are truly dismaying, especially because they are all too common. The real monsters are still out there in Hollywood, hiding in broad daylight.
Nik Dirga 