Last year, Cinema Fearité dove into The Day After, the 1983 television movie that scared the hell out of an entire nation that was living on the brink of nuclear war.  A year after the broadcast of that groundbreaking film, Great Britain came out with their own horrifying vision of the aftermath of an atomic attack.  Since we are still, as a country, flirting with the reality of a nuclear incident, it seems like as good a time as any to take a good look at Threads.

It’s always fun when one actor gets to play multiple roles in the same movie.  Sometimes, it’s twins (Sisters, Dead Ringer, The Black Room, Jack’s Back) or doppelgangers (Enemy, +1).  Other times, it’s a more creative use of the characters (Alien: Covenant, Nocturnal Animals).  Still other times, it’s a thematic motif (Cloud Atlas, Holy Motors, Anomalisa).  And sometimes, it’s just for show.  That’s the case with Liquid Sky.

When Wes Craven’s Scream was released in 1996, it single-handedly revitalized the slasher genre during a time when, let’s face it, horror movies were pretty stagnant.  The movie’s success opened the doors for more hip horror movies, and that fact was both a blessing and a curse.  For every I Know What You Did Last Summer, there were ten Bloody Murders and Lovers Lanes.  But the late nineties did have its bright spots.  And the 1998 meta-slasher Urban Legend was one of them.

When people think of classic vampire movies, two images instantly come to mind.  The first is that of Count Orlok in the silent masterpiece Nosferatu.  The second is Bela Lugosi’s brilliant performance as the title character in Universal Pictures’ definitive telling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  The missing link between these two bloodsucking titans of cinema is the Danish film Vampyr.

Just as the title suggests, Eating Animals is a documentary about the American factory farming system.  Director Christopher Dillon Quinn (West of Memphis) based the film on the book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close), and it essentially, through interviews and investigative footage, follows the lives and times of a handful of the farmers that bring animals like turkeys, chickens, and pigs from the farm to the table.

Modern home invasion movies have lost their creativity, at least when compared to the classics.  Sure, movies like The Strangers, You’re Next, and Breaking In are terrifying, but they’re as formulaic as movies come.  The classic home invasion movies like Wait Until Dark, When a Stranger Calls (and its sequel When a Stranger Calls Back), and Death Weekend all had a twist that kept the concept fresh.  And so does the 1964 melodrama Lady in a Cage.

Those who grew up in the seventies may remember a children’s show nestled in between “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company” on PBS called “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”  It wasn’t as flashy as its bookends, but it was every bit as charming, and probably even more historically important.  The show and its creator, Fred Rogers, are the subject of the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

There’s a Friday the 13^th this week.  So, it’s as good a time as any for Cinema Fearité to take a look at the wackiest – and most maligned – entry into the popular and prolific Friday the 13^th franchise, the ninth film in the series, the one made in 1993 after Jason had gone everywhere else in the world, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.

At the beginning of To Hell and Back: The Kane Hodder Story, Kane Hodder claims that he has murdered more people on film than any other actor in history.  As a horror movie icon who has played both Friday the 13^th’s Jason Voorhees and Hatchet’s Victor Crowley four times each, he is probably correct.  But even if he isn’t, no one is going to argue with him.

A while back, Cinema Fearité triggered ex-babysitters everywhere when we covered the 1979 classic When a Stranger Calls.  Now, we’ve got sequel fever.  It’s time to take a look at the 1993 TV movie When a Stranger Calls Back.

In her long and storied career, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has gone from lawyer to judge to Supreme Court justice.  But perhaps her most interesting accomplishment has been becoming an internet meme, an inspirational figure for both modern women and liberal activists all over America.  Her fascinating story is the subject of a new documentary, appropriately entitled RBG.

Between his being kicked out of the Academy because of his embattled personal life and his home being the site of the infamous Manson Family murders, it’s easy to forget that Roman Polanski is a talented filmmaker, despite the fact that he’s constantly churning out movies, from Knife in the Water in the early sixties to Venus in Fur in 2013.  His two horror masterpieces are Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, but in between those two movies, in 1967, he made the quirky little horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers.

In 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to the Papacy and took the name Pope Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi.  Almost immediately, he became a controversial figure because of his progressive views.  A few years later, documentary filmmaker Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, The Salt of the Earth) was given unprecedented access to the Pope in order to make a movie.  That movie is simply called Pope Francis: A Man of His Word.

In 1987, action star Arnold Schwarzenegger teamed up with director Paul Michael Glaser to adapt the Stephen King/Richard Bachman novel The Running Man for the big screen.  But that wasn’t the only convict reality show movie to see release that year.  Decades before The Asylum was even a thing, an unwitting rip-off called Deathrow Gameshow explored the same concept as The Running Man, only with far more hilarious results.

While the great Stanley Kubrick had a fairly modest output over his long career (13 movies in 46 years), there’s little doubt that he’s considered to be one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.  Filmworker takes a close look at the second half of his career through the eyes of someone who was involved intimately in it, his trusted colleague and friend Leon Vitali.