William Castle

Fifty years ago , journeyman director William Castle took out an insurance policy in case anyone died of fright during his first independent production, Macabre. Over the next seven years, Castle became the king of the gimmicks, as he promoted his pictures with hokey processes like Emergo, Percepto and Illusion-O,13 Ghosts......

One of my favourite movies METROPOLIS

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is very much a film that could only have been made in 1920’s Berlin, where the decadence of the cosmopolitan elite rubbed against the struggles of the working man like salt against a razor wound. Where gentlemen clubs existed off of Unter der Linden based around the concept of gang sodomizing, then consuming geese; where helmet-haired starlets pranced naked in winter down Friedrichstrasse, clad only in mink and garters; where the saying went that cocaine replaced water from the flowing faucets of Charlottenberg’s penthouses; and where, beneath all this excess, the working class seethed, wanting some semblance of sanity restored to their lives as they did everything humanly possible to keep their families’ heads above water.