2020 has been a heavy-hearted year of great loss. Beyond the tragic loss of 652,000 people dead worldwide (to date) from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, or icons such as longtime Civil Rights advocate/congressman John Lewis, we’ve also lost many greats in the entertainment industry. Just this month, we lost the legendary Olivia de Havilland (“Gone With the Wind”), Kelly…
Tag: #JohnSaxon
“Battle Beyond The Stars” (1980); Roger Corman’s scrappy, campy answer to Star Wars turns 40…
The Clone Wars. Following the unexpected success of George Lucas’ “Star Wars” in 1977 (“A New Hope” wouldn’t be added to the title until years later), studios big and small were scrambling to create their own space operas. Some were embarrassingly obvious in their mimicry (Luigi Cozzi’s “Starcrash”), others gained their own cult followings (Glen…
Retro-Musings: 1966’s “Queen of Blood” shares plenty of hemoglobin with “ALIEN”…
In the 1960s, legendary guerrilla-filmmaking producer Roger Corman (whose protégés would include Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Jonathan Demme, Gale Ann Hurd and James Cameron) imported several high-end Soviet-era science fiction movies, which he recut using American-shot scenes, actors and English-language dubbing. This was a practice similar to what was done to Ishiro Honda’s 1954 atomic-bomb allegory…
