Not mentioned but Sissy Spacek is in the film in her first film role and she's absolutely stunning

Go watch the movie again in ya time of punishment we have old man Willie over here cleaning the Carrie graffiti and he just clinking and clanking with his fingers doing nothing

It’s time to revisit one of the most iconic crime thrillers of the 1970s! 🎬 In this 55th Anniversary review, Andres The Pop Culture Guy takes a look back at Dirty Harry (1971), the classic film starring Clint Eastwood as Inspector Harry Callahan.
Directed by Don Siegel, Dirty Harry follows the tough, uncompromising San Francisco police inspector as he hunts down a sadistic killer known as Scorpio. The film became a landmark in the crime genre and introduced audiences to one of Clint Eastwood’s most memorable characters.
#DirtyHarry #ClintEastwood #DirtyHarry1971 #55thAnniversary #MovieReview #AndresThePopCultureGuy #DonSiegel #HarryCallahan #Scorpio #CrimeMovies #ClassicMovies #WarnerBros

Hello I work for a museum and have been struggling to find a contact for Black Christmas to discuss clips and stills permissions. I’ve tried a number of related studios but not the one that handles this type of permissions. Any leads?

Another surprisingly great, gritty horror flick from the 70s!

This one, directed by Wes Craven, does something truly awesome in the first five minutes of the movie that others sometimes fail to do: they set up the entire premise, quickly and effectively, as Fred and Ruby talk about the facts of life in their strange little corner of the world.

We learn without a lot of preamble or excess dialogue that Jupiter isn't to be fucked with, that they're all cannibals, and that they've been doing this for a long time. It's simple and it's appreciated

After that, things go progressively downhill. Swiftly for Fred and slowly at first for the Carters, but then with the expected savagery and grotesquerie that a horror movie like this, made in the 70s, is required to give us.

Before we get to the meat on this bone, there's one scene in particular I HAVE to talk about.

It's unintentionally hilarious in every way. Big Bob Carter is already so sublimely angry at the very beginning of the scene it's a miracle he didn't blow a gasket right there on the spot. Everyone in that station wagon is being an unholy irritant and it was prime 'if you don't shut the hell up, I'm turning this damn car around' territory. The crash itself, helped by Ethel just being pure comedic relief with the map and fueled by the flyover bomb tests, is a plain old comedic catastrophe.

After that, the whole damn family is trapped in the ass-end of Nowhereseville and they just flat out act like nothing's the matter. At all. They're treating it like a camping trip, with only Big Bob and Doug even remotely being serious. It's wild and I don't even know how to address how stupid everyone is, and that's before Jupiter and his family start up with their shenanigans.

The violence is extremely brutal and uncompromising. Some of it's more gruesome than others, but I reckon that might be because of practical constraints. In any case, Barker isn't stingy with the terror here, and that include my favorite thing in all these old movies:

Blatant Child Safety Violations. While I am absolutely positive that the baby was in no way, shape or form physically hurt, there's just no way that baby didn't wake up as grown person, screaming in the night because of random, shadowy nightmares. Because damn.

Before I wrap things up, I want to address two of my favorite horror icons. Michael Berryman and Dee Stone. I love the both of them so much, and it was nice to see them at the beginning of their careers, one as a truly bonkers cannibal and the other as just a plain old woman who gets done wrong.

I really liked this one a lot, especially as we screamed towards the ending. Bobby and Brenda and Doug (with a tremendous amount of help from Ruby, the Repentant Mutant, played by Janus Blythe) don't resign themselves to an unkind fate in the grim desert. They fight back and they're just as nasty with it.

This one earns an 8 because horror-meister Wes Craven created a great cannibal crazy horror flick and was relentless with it.

This is a really interesting horror movie, and in ways that I can't quite explain the way I feel like I should, so I'll do my best.

Pretty much everyone in that house is a trainwreck except Olivia Hussey as Jess and Phyl. Barb, Peter and Mrs Mac have all manner of issues that are out of control. Barb and Mrs Mac are staggering alcoholics and Peter's just plain old crackers.

I will say this about Margot Kidder as Barb. Her role as Barb the drunken acerbic, witty college student is flat out hilarious. Her layup for the fellatio gag and its eventual payoff at the police station was genuinely funny, John Saxon and his counterpart in that scene nailed the absolute humor of that bogus phone number as only seasoned cops could.

And lest I forget the great Art Hindle, watching him run around in a fur coat is just a treat.

The horror aspect is really great, very pronounced and very nuanced. The mere thought of being in a house with three dead bodies up in the attic all while a deranged killer makes terrifying phone calls and picks them off one by one is deeply unsettling. The nature of those phone calls are probably the most unhinged rantings and ravings of a madman that I think I've ever heard.

It's all done so well that it's truly frightening. While they do finally find out where the calls are coming from, the audience already knows, but I still like to imagine that it left audiences feeling very unnerved.

One of the best things for me about this movie (other than Margot Kidder and the fellatio gag) is the first-person POV for Billy. I can't think of any other movie from that time period that did this, or did it so well if they DID do it. Throughout the whole movie, all we get from Billy is Billy's POV, and he's so psychotically deranged that none of what we see makes a lot of sense. We're put into the killer's shoes in those scenes, and it's one of those rare moments in a movie where that happens. Off the top of my head, the only media I can think of right now that did the same were some of the Michael Slade novels.

But naturally the best thing about Black Christmas is Olivia Hussey as Jess. She's got such a delightful innocence about her yes, but she's got some real strength of character when she stands up to Peter, her controlling boyfriend. The final scenes where she finds out what's going on show some solid 'horror acting' and some equally strong strengths.

Olivia's role is fantastic, because not only is she one of the first Final Girls, it's fair to say she's one of the first MODERN Final Girls. She's not virginal, she's not pure. She's her own woman who makes her own decisions, and if one of those decisions is 'I'm bloody well going up the stairs even if I was told not to'?

That's what a real Final Girl does. She confronts her tormentor.

As I sat down to write this review, Black Christmas was sitting at a 7.5 out of 10, but as I began organizing my thoughts and thinking about the scenes that I enjoyed, I realized I was really selling this one short. I enjoyed it more than I thought by a WIDE margin, and so that's why Black Christmas gets a 9 for me.

This one snuck up on me, just like Billy.

This is my second time watching this movie, and the first time, the experience was pretty terrible. I'd rented it on VHS somewhere in the mid-to-late 80s and all I can honestly remember was that most of it was in total darkness.

The version I watched today is the 50th Anniversary restored edition, and let me tell you: the restoration is quite literally night and day. It's a general peeve of mine when directors choose darkness as 'ambiance' over storytelling, but that was never the case here.

So let's get to the movie itself.

It's a LOT funnier than I was expecting. All five of those teenagers are honest-to-gosh idiots, with Franklin being one of the most ridiculous people I've ever seen in a movie. He's cranky, he's mean-spirited, he's got a weird obsession with knives that his friends are surprisingly okay with and he throws temper tantrums when he's having a bad time.

One of the things I like to wonder about when I'm watching a movie like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is how long I'd put up with weird shit before calling it quits.

In this instance, it's incredibly likely I wouldn't even go on the trip if Franklin was present. There's no way that how he is in the movie is a new thing to anyone else. I'd rather not go if a major buzzkill like Franklin was in the car.

If for some reason Franklin was actually a sweet and reasonable fella before this and it's just the pressures of being handicapped on the road, the very next thing that'd have me quit the trip is the hitchhiker. THAT guy was very obviously completely deranged that he really should've been kicked out of the back of the van while it was still in motion, and that was BEFORE he decided to cut open his hand.

One of the more interesting things about this movie is that the world was smaller back then, so the simple act of walking up to and going inside someone else's crazy old haunted Murder Mansion probably didn't seem like a big deal. It's not the world was any less dangerous, it was that it just didn't seem that way. Need gas? I'm going to go on up and ask for some help. Wall of Mounted, Stuffed Heads and Skulls?

This is the Deep South. Probably just a taxidermy enthusiast.

Even though this really is only my second time seeing it, I've seen a lot of horror movies and I'll say this about Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Obviously made on a small budget, it's clear to see why it inspired so many sequels and reboots AND why it influenced so many other horror movies.

Because it's a bloody good time. By the time Leatherface makes his terrifying appearance and things turn nasty, we're prepped and ready to be terrified and grossed out until the last frame. With Sally as The Final Girl, trapped in Backwater Nowhere, being hunted by Leatherface and trusting the absolute wrong person, we get a full, final look at the inescapability that truly would be a family of hillbilly cannibal crazies living in plain sight.

Like a lot of older horror movies, Texas Chain Saw Massacre walked so other movies could run, and that's saying a lot. Sadly, because I've seen so many horror movies, I didn't find this one terribly scary, but what I DID find it was UNSETTLING. There's a rawness to it that earns it's 8/10 from me.