The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on May 14, 2021

ARIZONA is a 1940 Western, produced by Columbia, and starring one of my favorites, Jean Arthur. During the Civil War era, a tough, independent-minded woman named Phoebe Titus (Jean Arthur) starts a freight company in the growing community of Tucson. Phoebe is an ambitious woman who goes after what   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on May 11, 2021

THE PASSAGE is another one of those 1970s international productions that have a action-war element to the storyline and a star-studded cast. It was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who had made two excellent WWII films--ICE COLD IN ALEX and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE. THE PASSAGE is a far cry...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on May 6, 2021

The best film in the 3-disc "Carole Lombard Collection II" Blu-ray set from Kino is HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE, a 1935 romantic comedy co-starring Fred MacMurray and directed by Mitchell Leisen. Carole Lombard plays Regi Allen, a manicurist at a ritzy hotel. Regi is unhappy with her life and hopes...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on May 2, 2021

In February I wrote a blog post on Kino's Blu-ray of James Whale's THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR. That 1933 film was remade by Whale, and Universal, in 1938 under the title WIVES UNDER SUSPICION, which I saw for the first time last night. THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR is...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on May 1, 2021

The next film I will be examining from Kino's new "Carole Lombard Collection II" Blu-ray set is LOVE BEFORE BREAKFAST, a 1936 romantic comedy that is not one of the actress's better movies. LOVE BEFORE BREAKFAST was made at Universal, and it was directed by Walter Lang, who would soon...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on April 26, 2021

Kino has released the "Carol Lombard Collection II", a Blu-ray set containing three of the great lady's films. As in the first set, released last summer, each movie gets its own disc case. I have to start off by saying that all three films in this second collection have been...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on April 25, 2021

One great thing about having a Roku device is all the free movie channels one has access to from it. I've found plenty of obscure, rare films on these channels--titles that I think are far more interesting than the brand-name stuff on HBO Max or Netflix. I recently discovered THE...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on April 24, 2021

Following last year's magnificent release of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, Warner Archive gives us another restored horror film classic on home video--the 1932 film DOCTOR X. This movie is a gloriously insane example of a Pre-Code thriller, and it is historically important as well. It was the first ho   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on April 14, 2021

Of all the movie thrillers Val Lewton produced for RKO in the 1940s, THE BODY SNATCHER, based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, is by far my favorite. It contains what I feel is one of Boris Karloff's greatest screen performances, along with a beautifully written script and atmospheric...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on April 13, 2021

CROSSED SWORDS is a 1977 film adaptation of Mark Twain's story THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER. The movie was produced by the Salkind family, who were behind such films as the 1970s Three Musketeer series and SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE. This is a title I had very little knowledge of, and...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on April 12, 2021

I know what you are thinking--"Dan, there's no way you're going to like this movie. Why even write a blog post on it??" Well, it's what I do. The latest installment of the "Monsterverse"--or the "Monarchverse", or whatever you want to call it--pits Godzilla vs. King Kong. But there's a...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on April 3, 2021

The 1961 film WHAT A CARVE UP! (released in America as NO PLACE LIKE HOMICIDE!) belongs in a small mini-genre of British thriller spoofs made in the early 1960s. The other titles in this group are the 1962 THE OLD DARK HOUSE (made by Hammer, directed by William Castle) and...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 28, 2021

PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE (1954) is Warner Bros.' 3-D follow up to their hit HOUSE OF WAX. The film is based on Poe's famous tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", but, as expected, several liberties are taken with the source material. In 1890s Paris, a mysterious fiend is...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 27, 2021

Do we really need a four-hour alternate version of a two-hour comic book movie, that, in my original estimation, was just okay? Well, we have one with ZACH SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE. Thanks to my dear brother Robert, I was able to view this elephantine mass of clickbait. I'm not going...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 23, 2021

I've been a fan of Hammer horror films for a long time....but until recently I had never read any of the various novelizations based on the company's movies. These books were released in the 1960s and 70s, and some of the original paperback copies fetch a high price on the...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 20, 2021

This is a film that was new to me. It is one of Boris Karloff's most obscure films, and for good reason. In his fine book ENGLISH GOTHIC author Jonathan Rigby describes the movie as a "ho-hum melodrama", and he's right on the mark. Boris Karloff spent most of the...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 14, 2021

One of the major reasons I am such a classic film buff is that I watched the cartoons made at Warner Bros. from the 1930s to the 1950s every day as a kid for years. I watched plenty of other cartoons then--Tom & Jerry, the various Hanna Barbera series, Disney--but...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 13, 2021

Yesterday on Facebook, my friend, prolific audio commentator Troy Howarth, posted a list of his favorite movie actor voices. I thought it was an intriguing idea for a movie list, so of course I appropriated it for my own use. The question is, how does one define the parameters of...   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 12, 2021

James Stewart is one of my favorite all-time actors, and I've seen nearly all of his films. One I had not seen until last night was FOOL'S PARADE, a 1971 picture produced and directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, who had worked with Stewart a number of times in the 1960s....   read more

The Hitless Wonder Movie Blog Posted by Dan Day, Jr. on March 8, 2021

THE DARK HOUR (1936) is another one of those hour-long low-budget B movie mysteries. This one was produced by the Chesterfield company, and directed by future Abbott & Costello veteran Charles Lamont. The most notable thing about this movie (in my mind at least) is that it features three Univer   read more