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by Mark Lansing_Archive
Timothy Carey's The World's Greatest Sinner is a really mind-blowing low-budget masterpiece in which an insurance salesman has an epiphany, renames himself God, forms a frantic rock 'n' roll band, and runs for president after promising eternal life to everyone.Night of the Lepus is a wonderfully ridiculous monster movie in which rabbits the size of Honda Civics run rampant in the Southwest. No matter how hard they try, the bunnies stubbornly refuse to be frightening. It's marvelous. One of my personal favorites of Roger Corman's output of the '50s, A Bucket of Blood concerns a nebbishy would-be artist working in a beatnik hangout who starts killing things and turning them into sculptures. All hail Dick Miller ... game show annoyance Bert Convey appears in a supporting role. Have you ever dreamed of seeing a movie in which Johnny Cash fends off the police by using Ronnie Howard as a human shield? Watch Door to Door Maniac (aka Five Minutes to Live) and scratch that off your bucket list. José Mojica Marins was a Brazilian actor and director who made some seriously deranged horror movies playing his trademark character Coffin Joe. At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (aka à Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma) was his first, and it's still expressively bizarre 55 years after it was released. Leonard Kastle only directed one movie, but it's a doozy. The Honeymoon Killers is a stark and creepy horror-noir about a an angry, overweight spinster who falls for a con man who marries women, only to take their money and abandon them. They fall in love and her obsessive jealousy leads them into a string of murders. Martin Scorsese was the original director but was let go after two days of shooting for working too slow; Francois Truffaut cited it as a personal favorite. I can pass along more if anyone asks politely.
"Everything should be kept. I regret everything I’ve ever thrown away." -- Richard Hell