My Favorite Movies

A brilliant dissection of life in the 50s. Cortosone in the film is really just the catalyst that unleashes Ed Avery's deep-seated dissatisfaction with his lot. The movie looks like a 50s magazine ad for the perfect middle class existence. But those glossy surfaces and split level homes disguise regret, anger, fiduciary crises, and the neverending grasp for the perfect picture wish fulfillment fantasy that 50s America was taught to want to live in, but which always lies frustratingly out of reach to most.

A hallucinatory synaptic journey that finds breathtaking realism in surrealism. The film is constructed like a series of memories, where music acts as a bridge that defies space and time. It is instantly more realistic because of it's extreme stylization. Must see for all serious film lovers.

Only Mario Bava could make a film based on an Italian comic book series that basically glorifies a sexy terrorist and his blond bombshell girlfriend with whom he frequently fleeces the government of gold, emeralds, and even millions of dollars in cash... just so that they can make love on it, in their multi-tiered rotating bed. This is the movie Austin Powers wanted to be, but just wasn't cool enough to. The film is filled with various technogadgetry and bric-a-brac of the late 60s, with its PopArt colors and often imperceptive matte paintings. Bava was a genius with a low budget, and much of what you see was literally created with smoke and mirrors. A vivid document of 60s filmmaking (check out Bava's hilarious and still amazing vision of a 60s den of iniquity) and a timeless adventure movie that is just as entertaining and thought-provoking today as it was then.