Have You Ever Seen

Neil Marshall might surpass The Descent one day, but his second movie is his magnum opus. And it's an outstanding aural and visual experience. The authenticity of his 6 spelunking women and a bunch of stuntmen playing hostile creatures who live in underground caves and hunt humans help make this set-bound production feel oh so real. But what IS real, what's not...and just how feral does Sarah actually get? Shauna Macdonald is very good as the emotionally-shattered-yet-ferocious Sarah, while Natalie Mendoza is as cool as she is stunning playing the tough, reckless and dishonest Juno. The Descent has one...

The 8th of 9 films on this channel in Scary Movie Month is a B&W sci-fi-thriller directed by…well, was it Christian Nyby or was it his producer Howard Hawks? Whoever led Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, Margaret Sheridan and James Arness through their paces did a solid-enough job. There's paranoia in The Thing From Another World, but John Carpenter's 1982 take on the material is just far superior...partly because it does paranoia and isolation so much better. The original DOES have an infamous jump scare with the alien, plus there IS tension and uncertainty throughout. When WILL the veggie va...

Before Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino teamed up in From Dusk Till Dawn to make a macho gangster-comedy that turns into a vampire-action film. It wasn't what people were expecting from these 2, but the friends pulled off a violent, bloody, slick, nasty and often tacky fangs flick. George Clooney's progression from TV star to movie star was helped in large part by working so well here with Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, Salma Hayek, writer/irritating actor Tarantino and director Rodriguez. And how about that scene-stealing Cheech Marin! After that review, I spent 20 minutes rattling off facts & figures and...

Takashi Yamazaki wrote and directed one of the great monster movies of recent decades...and it IS the best Godzilla flick I've ever seen. The kaiju that wreaks so much havoc on Japan right after the country was decimated during WWII is no hero to the humans in Godzilla Minus One. It's actually a bit of an angry god who means them much harm with its atomic breath. They devised some incredible Oscar-winning VFX shots of the big beast and its carnage, yet Yamazaki also knows how to show human moments with Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe raising a...

Robert Weine was on the forefront of German expressionist filmmaking and the director's Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari is one of the greatest films made in that style. The bizarre sets and odd camera angles (not to mention the all-encompassing nightmarish quality) remain one of a kind. Weine even goes and gives us a twist ending that turns all we've seen on its head! His wonderfully weird silent movie starring Werner Krauss as the doctor and Conrad Veidt as his somnambulist puppet/killer has often been called the first-ever horror film. So settle in for episode #767 as Scary Movie Month...

Celebrate Thanksgiving in Canada or Columbus Day in America with episode #766. Even though this continues to be Scary Movie Month, laughs one-up scares in Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein. Charles Barton's flick has comedy legends Bud & Lou hamming it up with horror icons Dracula, the Wolfman and…you know who. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. got one more crack at playing their most-famous roles. Several gags in the last 20 minutes are funnier than anything in the first hour, but the whole enterprise is consistently amusing. So try to get your buddy (CHICK!) to finally listen to your worries th...

Adam Wingard went on to direct a few Godzilla blockbusters, but his You're Next is one of the most-successful, low-budget mumblecore movies. Or, in this case, "mumblegore." Ti West and Joe Swanberg are big parts of the mumble movement too, although Sharni Vinson is the standout in this cast. She's excellent as the final girl who can REALLY fight back in a star-making role that wasn't. She defends her boyfriend's house mostly alone from a home invasion by masked men who use crossbows & axes to whack one family member at a time. There are 3 funny "upend the genre" moments...

Punk rockers have to fight back against their drug-peddling, murderous hosts in the second edition in Have You Ever Seen's 11th Annual Scary Movie Month. Green Room isn't going to make you jump in fright or sweat out every pore, but it IS an intense experience as Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat and Imogen Poots try to avoid being murdered by Patrick Stewart and his jerky group of neo-Nazis. Arms are left in very bad condition, dogs go for the jugular and the body count is enormous for a fairly contained movie. The violence isn't gratuitous in Jeremy Saulnier's dark...

The 11th Annual Scary Movie Month starts on a Friday this year…and this 763rd episode spends (or wastes) time talking about an early entry in the slasher genre. The Burning is all about an abusive caretaker named Cropsey being burned nearly to death in a stupid prank, then the mutilated man comes back years later for revenge against anyone…and everyone. Tony Maylam's hack shriek-fest isn't scary. It's just cheesy and grisly. Not in a fun way either, even with all the rampant nudity. This lazy dreck is slickly made, at least, with major players like the Weinsteins work...

It's fitting that with Scary Movie Month right around the spooky corner, here's a Japanese classic that's all about death. Yojimbo is the first Akira Kurosawa film on Have You Ever Seen in quite a few years. And just like in Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood and so many of his others, it's been very influential on other filmmakers. Longtime AK collaborator, Toshiro Mifune, plays a selfish ronin who works 2 sides of a gang war against each other. The antihero is, as he always was, very Kabuki, but also very commanding. He's the star of a bloody and...

For the 8th year running, Have You Ever Seen spends time on the film that won Best Picture several months earlier. Paul Thomas Anderson finally won not just 1, but 3 Oscars for his funny, often-thrilling action movie. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a former revolutionary (and perpetual nitwit pothead) who's raising Chase Infiniti on his own, since her mother (a dangerously dynamic Teyana Taylor) ratted on their fellow terrorists. Sean Penn is a vicious, racist lawman who's sexually obsessed with Taylor while Benicio Del Toro is a goofy, yet helpful karate sensei. PTA's flick is complicated, since it's all about often-unlikable rabble...

Wonder Boys and X-Men: The Last Stand might not have much in common, except they made my Top 10 lists in 2000 and 2006. In this 760th episode, I first dug into the lived-in, lovely loneliness in Curtis Hanson's movie about fans of the printed word. Wonder Boys is funny, offbeat and quite satisfying. Michael Douglas leads a terrific cast while the likes of Maguire, Downey, McDormand and Holmes are varying degrees of wonderful too. Just delightful. Then my X-Men 3 review got even more time. The huge-budget production was rushed, there were probably too many actors in the cast and it (apparently...

What a scoop! The Labour Day episode talks about what's going down in Billy Wilder's caustic Ace In The Hole. His gift was comedy, but he could obviously handle the serious stuff too. Here he wrote and directed a searing drama about crooked cops, the opportunistic media, bad wives, leeches, ghoulish gawkers...and 1 suffering victim. Ace In The Hole was underappreciated 75 years ago and it was a box office bomb. It's thought of as a classic now, even if it isn't perfect. Kirk Douglas didn't have a problem playing heels...or overacting. He does both here. He's a greedy...

To put a close on August (a month that ended up being about performers performing), I'm getting into the doin's about Howard Hawks' amusing musical starring those mega-watters Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. Well, pseudo-musical. Hawks was one of the best directors of rom-coms...and THAT material in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is at least close to his typical level. The elaborately excellent costumes, the Technicolor and the "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" number just aren't what he was best at, but even that good stuff works well too. The dual love story is snappy amidst all kinds of...

The 757th episode is all about performers. First, Disney's hit about a flying elephant who gets loaded and sees pink elephants is the focus. Dumbo's print on Disney Plus is beautiful. The voicework is also good, plus it's charming, sweet, and (controversial black crows aside) the mother-loves-child story is eternal. Next up was the silent comedy, Show People. Director King Vidor and star Marion Davies were a good team on more than 1 project back then, yet neither has previously been discussed on Have You Ever Seen. Just as in reality, Davies is good at being light and fun in...

This is the 11th time a Coen Brothers film has been discussed on Have You Ever Seen, although this black comedy is slyer than many of the others. There's also a lot of violence and horror in Barton Fink. It's covering a lot of ground. John Turturro plays the title character, a Broadway playwright who's hired to write a wrestling picture in 1941 Hollywood. After dealing with writer's block for what seems like weeks on end, his script gets meta...and things get weird. John Goodman plays a complicated character with a lot of wit and devilishness while John Mahoney...

The 755th episode of Have You Ever Seen is a doubleheader of oldies with very little in common. First, it's Jules Dassin's tough and uncompromising prison-break drama, Brute Force. It was brutally violent for 1947 audiences, as Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford and friends team up to bust out...partly to escape Hume Cronyn's vicious captain of the guards. It's one of the great jailbird flicks, even if it's been surpassed by the likes of Cool Hand Luke and Shawshank in the 8 decades since. Then I touched on Michael Cimino's infamous Heaven's Gate...although that review is more of a defence...

A holiday Monday is a good time to cover a classic: the action/sci-fi/horror that is Aliens. James Cameron's blockbuster was his follow-up to his action/sci-fi/horror hit The Terminator. This might have been a horrible experience for the director and his production team, but everybody involved came up with one of the greatest sequels of all time. Humans battle xenomorphs and the result was many iconic moments and lines of dialogue...and there's a sympathetic feminist at the centre. Sigourney Weaver's best-known character works so well off the likes of Biehn, Henn, Reiser, Henriksen, Paxton and...

Robert Donat & Madeleine Carroll were due for a reviewin' on Have You Ever Seen, so episode #753 has them starring in a Hitchcock movie. Ol' Al has come up a lot on this channel...and The 39 Steps isn't even in his Top 10 best movies. This fun thriller was one of his best movies made in England, sure, but his resume is filled with plenty of better stuff. In this one (where the title itself is Hitch's "McGuffin"), Donat pulls off repeatedly impressive escapes, even though he's an ordinary and innocent man falsely accused. That's a regular Hitchcock trope...and the...

John Travolta, Nancy Allen and director Brian De Palma teamed up to make the brilliant horror flick Carrie in 1976, but the team was nearly at their best 5 years later in this one about movie-makers. The show-offy De Palma, who mostly made thrillers, loved his characters to be all kinds of shades of gray. Mission possible here. Blow Out's set-ups & pay-offs are excellent...and the ending is operatic, symbolic and powerful. That perfect scream is heartbreaking. This violent tragedy is well-crafted, with inspirations from Antonioni's Blow-Up and the incident at Chappaquiddick. So go get some sound effects for the foley...

Will Ferrell's popularity peaked right around 20 years ago, but he was about as huge as comedy stars got in 2006. In Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, he isn't goofing around...although maybe that was to his fans' discontent. And he's not in tragedy or a comedy, but a dramedy...and the man who had always gone big proved he could also play quiet, nerdy and sad. Emma Thompson is a famous author writing & narrating everything he does...and it upends his life. Falling for the woman he's auditing--the Maggie Gyllenhaal character--upends it too. Stranger Than Fiction also has Dustin Hoffman...

The French Foreign Legion called the 3 Geste boys and they trekked off to Africa to end up in William Wellman's tense adventure flick. It's an action-war film that ends with a long, but well-paced siege inside a fort. Gary Cooper is miscast as the title character (he's too old and too American), but he has pretty good chemistry with Ray Milland and Robert Preston, who play his brothers. Susan Hayward is briefly in this too, although Brian Donlevy steals the movie as a jerk sergeant...and got an Oscar nomination for it. There's also a movie-long mystery here after...

Let's go back to December 2016 when John Lee Hancock's The Founder and Martin Scorsese's Silence were positioned as Oscar contenders. Neither won a gold trophy, but Hancock made the better movie. The Founder is a big-business biopic about Ray Kroc sharking Dick & Mac McDonald out of their own fast-food creation, then franchising McDonald's worldwide. The product isn't so good now, but the film about it is very entertaining, especially Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch's chemistry as the McDonald's brothers. Then I reviewed Silence, although that section is really an evaluation of the noted gangster maestro's religious passion projects...

June started on this podcast with a fast-cutting musical in Moulin Rouge. Now I end the month talking about an old-school Technicolor song-and-dancer...and it was an award-winning mega-smash. The King And I is Walter Lang's crowning achievement as a director and the King is the part Yul Brynner played thousands of times onstage. He won an Oscar for playing this hardheaded chauvinist on celluloid opposite Deborah Kerr's Anna, the headstrong English widow hired to teach his many kids. The culture clash leads to a curious "love" story where they barely touch each other until that...well, let's say...

The podcast rulebook says you have to cover a plane movie for episode #747, so I went with the daddy of the '70s disaster craze. The planes are 707s in Airport, but oh well. George Seaton writes & directs a cast of stars & Oscar-winners (including Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, George Kennedy and Jacqueline Bissett). He was rewarded with a blockbuster hit that snagged 10 Oscar nominations (Helen Hayes even won for her adequate supporting performance) and it started a run of Airport flicks. Those 3 sequels and the various disaster films this influenced followed the formula of intertwining stories, romance...

F.W. Murnau didn't live long enough to direct a huge slate of films, but the man bullhorning The Last Laugh also has Nosferatu, Faust and Sunrise on his resume. Like those, The Last Laugh is a silent picture And THIS one infamously uses very few intertitles to explain dialogue or motivations. So Emil Jannings went very big! The story is that he loses his job as the doorman of a swanky hotel, leading to depression and shame. The artistry by Murnau and his team are terrific. Their movie is slow-paced and extremely melodramatic, but there's poetry...until an...

The key word is charming in the 745th edition of Have You Ever Seen. Only The Lonely has John Candy playing a single Chicago cop who lives with his widowed mother (Maureen O'Hara). He's an extroverted sweetheart who falls for shy Ally Sheedy, but while his bigoted mom might love her son(s), that love is on HER terms. Candy didn't get to play the romantic lead very often (or ever?) before Chris Columbus gave him that chance in the Mama's Boy movie, but he showed he had the chops to evolve as more than just a laugh machine...

It's as if 007 went to prison for decades, was let out by government guys played by John Spencer & William Forsythe and then he had to help a nerdy Nicolas Cage save hostages on a deserted island. Well, hold up, that IS the plot of The Rock! Michael Bay's action movie is deeper than you might expect, with Ed Harris playing a superstar Marine general who becomes a terrorist…with sympathetic complexity. Cage is the out-of-his-element expert on chemical weapons who teams with Sean Connery's Bond-like ex-spy who once escaped from Alcatraz. The flick is a Bay/Bruckheimer/Simpson collab so...

The first episode of a non-theme month here in June (and the 743rd overall) gets loud about Baz Luhrmann's bombastic Moulin Rouge. It's the kind of zany project where the director and star of this Paris-set movie are both Australians (Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman) while the co-lead is Scottish (Ewan McGregor) and a Colombian (John Leguizamo) plays the real-life French writer Toulouse Lautrec. Kidman and McGregor are well-matched as gaga lovers and, while she got most of the raves, he's just as good...if not even better. Baz's main hook is to use anachronistic pop hits on the soundtrack...

I put a jaunty bow on Heroes Month with another multi-movie episode. For #742, I'm mostly talking about John Ford's My Darling Clementine, but there's a bit at the end about John Sturges' Gunfight At The O.K. Corral and George Cosmatos' Tombstone. Clementine stars Henry Fonda as the stoic marshal Wyatt Earp and Victor Mature as the uber-talented but sickly Doc Holliday. Linda Darnell is in the mix too and they're all surrounded by a smorgasbord of character actors. Doc, Wyatt and his brothers team up to take on the Clantons in what's considered to be one of the...

Since it's Memorial Day, I'm tipping a cap to veterans. And I've got another doubleheader in episode #741, with the bulk of the show devoted to Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (where American soldiers battle Somalis in 1993 Mogadishu), then there's a short bit at the end about William Wellman's Battleground (where American grunts take on the Nazis during the Battle Of The Bulge in WWII). Both films won technical Oscars and are intense, apolitical war stories. Appropriate for Heroes Month, you just fight for your fellow soldiers. Black Hawk Down stars the likes of Hartnett and McGregor, but we've also...

The ongoing effort to review long-ago movie stars has me talking about the dashing Tyrone Power and the beautiful Linda Darnell in The Mark Of Zorro. Gail Sondergaard and Basil Rathbone also have key roles in Rouben Mamoulian's 1940 flick. The Mexican man in black shares ties with Robin Hood and Batman, as the Z Man risks his life to rip off the rich to help out the poor. For an action movie, it's pretty muted, but it IS a good time. Then I talked for a bit about Hopalong Cassidy. The conflict is over cattle and territory, which is...

Call me Snake. Okay, well, that's too cool for me, so just make it Ryan. Either way, this 739th episode gets into the night life and action frenzy that is John Carpenter's Escape From New York. Kurt Russell was already establishing himself as something more than just a Disney kid, then his signature role here cemented it. The eclectic Van Cleef/Borgnine/Harry Dean supporting cast surrounding Russell is effective, but the production design, cinematography, music and other technicals in this dystopian sci-fi bleakness are the drawing card. Carpenter was cynical, yet so underrated in his time...even compared...

In anticipation of the theatrical re-release of Top Gun later this week, this 738th episode has me yapping about Tony Scott's blockbuster that put him on the map and made Tom Cruise a megastar. The one about cocky naval aviators is big, loud and very sweaty. You've got sleek jets, cool, sexy men (and also SOME women like Kelly McGillis)...and a killer soundtrack. The fly boys (including Val Kilmer & Anthony Edwards) also play topless volleyball and spend a lot of time in towels. Naturally, the megahit sequel Top Gun: Maverick came up a lot in this review, since...

Even though it's Star Wars Day, someone else can talk about Luke & Leia. What I have is a  super-long episode about much-older movies: the 1932 Tarzan & the 1924 Pan. Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan star in an exciting, sexy, action-adventure story. They worked with lions and hippos and crocs (and actors in animal suits) and it's all convincingly done, especially since none of the principal photography was actually in Africa. Then I talked about the boy who just refuses to age. Betty Bronson's Peter is going to stay in Never(Never)Land forever and ever (and ever)...even if Ernest Torrence's C...

It's Heroes Month! For this 736th episode, cue up the William Tell Overture and get ready for the masked vigilante & his native buddy. That's because the topic of the first of 2 movies today is The Lone Ranger (plus, of course Tonto....and also, hi-yo Silver). Stuart Heisler directs Clayton Moore, Jay Silverheels and Bonita Granville in an enjoyable western with all the necessary thrills and constant danger. For film #2, I spent 13 minutes talking about Gene Autry in South Of The Border. While The Singing Cowboy didn't impress me that much, this DOES get he, William Farnum and George Montgomery...

It's another doubleheader in episode #735, this time with 2 unrelated '50s classics. First up, I talk about the offbeat John Huston comedy Beat The Devil. The screenplay he wrote with Truman Capote is very quotable, even though its characters and daffy plot parody serious caper flicks like Huston's The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart has been a regular on Have You Ever Seen over the years, but this is the first episode ever for Jennifer Jones or Gina Lollobrigida. Jenny is quirky, cute and quite a talented liar while Gina is...well, staggeringly gorgeous. Then I veer from the fun...

Inside Man is a clever heist film with the twist staring you in the face from the beginning. It's also the first Spike Lee or Jodie Foster film to be reviewed on Have You Ever Seen in quite some time. Foster and Denzel Washington's scenes together are fantastic. The 2 of them, plus Clive Owen, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe and Chiwetel Ejiofor deliver. Ironically, though, for a film with such intensity for 2 straight hours, the actors are generally calm. Well, Denzel is showboating, but he's Denzel. You can't reign in that charisma machine. So for my 734th episode, settle in...

It's a short one for episode #733 of Have You Ever Seen, as I discuss Anthony Mann's biopic about the best-selling bandleader from the '30s & '40s. Smash hits Moonlight Serenade & In The Mood are Glenn Miller's 2 most-recognizable songs, tunes you'll know the minute you hear them. This is a straight-ahead "based on real people" movie (including his loving wife, Helen), but Mann, who often worked with James Stewart in this era, was an underrated director. And while Jimmy has OFTEN come up on this podcast, this is a first for June Allyson...and we also have a memorable...

I've got another multi-movie episode here in the 732nd edition of Have You Ever Seen. Jacques Tourneur directs Out Of The Past and Robert Siodmak is at the helm of The Spiral Staircase, even if it feels at times like one directed the other. Yet they both do a very good job with these films noir, including killing off many of their characters. Rhonda Fleming is in both, but in Past you've got Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas & Jane Greer, who gives one of the better performances in the history of femmes fatale. In Staircase, Dorothy McGuire, George Brent and...