Tonight, we’ll be talking a set of films that almost form a genre of their own. These films were often, though not always, “respected” by critics and the general public at large, but all bore that dark, almost despairing claustrophobia and realistic feel of what I and others were living every day out on the streets locally, far from the dayglo nons…

Archibald Alec Leach was born in Bristol, England at the turn of the century, January 18, 1904 to a tailor and a seamstress. A theatrical tour of NYC led him to emigrate at the ripe old age of 16, where he became a vaudeville song and dance man on the same circuit as the likes of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello and Ted Healy and his Stooges.…

The French crime film is different from those of other countries for several reasons. While some, certainly Jean Dellanoy's Soleil Des Voyeux (aka Action Man) draw elements from the German Krimi and the George Nader Jerry Cotton films and even the serial (particularly those of Feuillade, whose Fantomas and Les Vampires remain surprisingly gripping …

Roy Harold Scherer Jr. was born smack dab in the middle of both the Roaring 20’s and the country in Illinois, Thanksgiving of 1925. Of all the gay and bisexual actors and actresses we’ve covered, Hudson was easily the most elusive and convincing in his career long presentation as a very straight screen idol and leading man. While known to many in H…

Hugh John Mungo Grant was born at the start of September, 1960, Live at Hammersmith, London to a Highlander turned carpet salesman and a music and multilingual language teacher. A 1st XV division rugby player with a background in English literature who turned down an offer for a PhD in art history at London University, he instead took up drama at O…

Richard Walter Jenkins Jr. was born in November of 1925 in Wales to an hard drinking coal miner cum absentee father and a pub barmaid. Growing up in a rough steel mill town under the roof of his older sister and her husband, he left school to work in the mines after his sister’s husband (like both parents before him) fell ill, due to the unregulate…

Jennifer Lynn Lopez was born in the Bronx's Castle Hill, in July 1969 to an Army guy turned computer tech and housewife turned gym teacher. Her decision to take up dance led to a major falling out with her mother, leaving the aspiring terpsichore living at her dance studio for months thereafter. Kicking off her career as an In Living Color Fly Girl…

Sandra Annette Bullock was born on July 26, 1964, in our nations capitol, Washington, D.C. to a German opera singer (and daughter of a rocket scientist!) and an Alabama career military man who, perhaps surprisingly, was also a voice coach. A military brat, she spent her youth in Nuremberg, Vienna and Salzburg, before returning to attend school in V…

Sofia Costanza Brigida Villani Scicolone was born in the heyday of Mussolini, Rome 1934 to an engineer turned railway worker who may or may not have been descended from a Viscount and a piano teacher/local actress who he never married, hence leaving Loren and her mother in poverty. Finalizing in local beauty contests under the assumed name Sofia La…

Born to the trade right here in Manhattan, April of 1932, Tony Perkins was the son of theatrical actor Osgood (most notably appearing alongside Boris Karloff, George Raft and Paul Muni in Scarface the very same year.) Raised almost entirely by his mother and a French nanny, he self-avowedly "became abnormally attached to" his mother, developing "an…

Born in Newark, NJ in September of 1940, Brian DePalma went from physics student to student filmmaker in the heady height of the hippie era, with his early experimental films introducing none other than the much feted Robert DeNiro to the world at large. Following a surprising run of perversely Hitchcockian works like Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to…

Santa Monica, Thanksgiving of 1958, Jamie Lee Curtis was born to screen idols Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Left to be raised by a single mother as a toddler, Curtis dropped out after a single semester at law school to take on the wild world of thespianism as a television bit player in notable episodes of The Shaun Cassidy/Parker Stevenson Hardy Boy…

Born in NYC way back in 1938 to a garment district worker, Richard Benjamin met his wife to this very day, fellow actress Paula Prentiss, and would appear with her in several theatrical, filmic and televised roles (starting with late 60s sitcom He & She, oft referenced as a template for the iconic Mary Tyler Moore show.) This short lived but critic…

John Adam Belushi was born in Chicago, 1949...and like so many bright lights of the counterculture, left us at a disturbingly young age, only 33 years later at the dawn of March, 1982. A candle burning at both ends, this somersaulting, volatile, pratfall prone comedian stole the spotlight wherever he went, in both personal and onscreen life, from C…

Born in 1962 in Disneyworld territory, Orlando, Florida, Wesley Trent Snipes grew up on the mean streets of the Bronx, before shuttling back to Florida as a teen and then doing college out in California. After some awkward beginnings as a drug dealer in Miami Vice and the heavy in a Michael Jackson video (and losing out on a pair of high profile op…

Caryn Elaine Johnson, was born in Manhattan in 1955. A Trekkie since childhood, she would eventually go on to a recurring (if oft uncredited) role on the successor series to that very show... Working an unusual, character based standup in the vein of Carol Burnett or Tracy Ullman, it was none other than Steven Spielberg who pulled her from handling…

Edward Regan Murphy was born in Broooklyn's dicey Bushwick district, 1961, to a transit cop and ill fated aspiring comedian. Raised by a single mother (after a lengthy stint with foster parents!) and idolizing the similarly minded 70's standup star turned film lead Richard Pryor, he rose to fame as a four year veteran of Saturday Night Live, becomi…

Winifred Jacqueline Fraser Bisset came into this world in the latter days of WWII, in the Fall of 1944 to a Scotch GP and French lawyer cum housewife who biked her way into an airlift out of Occupied France and her new life in the rather rural climes of Surrey. A short modeling career led to roles in such disparate films (in quality as well as type…

Born Francis Albert Sinatra in lovely downtown Hoboken, NJ, Frank so idolized 1930s swing singer and the man they coined the term "crooner" over, Bing Crosby, that he decided not only to emulate his hero, but to effectively BECOME him in the eyes of the American public. And for all intents and purposes, he succeeded. Possessed of a lighter, more ly…

Manhattan’s own George Segal Jr. was an interesting actor, moving deftly between solid and quite serious dramatic roles to a career in far broader, if generally still intelligent comedies in the 70s. One of the first "ethnic" actors of prominence to leave his name unchanged, he specialized in easily frustrated, angrily gesticulating types, lashing …

Clint Eastwood, Jr. was born into wealth in San Francisco, complete with in-ground pool and country club membership. Despite being drafted into the Korean war, never saw a lick of combat, serving as lifeguard at Fort Ord for his entire stint in the military, all very much belieing his later "tough guy" image. Lambasted as a terrible actor by Hollyw…

Born at the dawn of the talkies in 1930, Richard St John Francis Harris was born to a “flour merchant” in Ireland, where he intended to become a rugby pro. With best laid plans derailed by a bout with disease, he decided to pursue a career in acting, only to find himself rejected as "too old" at the whopping age of 25. Nonetheless, he perservered f…

Harvard Literature major turned Biological Anthropology BA and medical school student turned author Michael Crichton penned no less than 26 novels...of which at least 9 were made into feature films. Turning screenwriter, he quickly shifted chairs to direction, delivering several memorable films (and scripting and producing even more.) With interest…

Tonight, we’re talking to a modern day doom metal giant. Originally working in a very different band and genre, Christian Hector and Daniel Droste ventured off into the rarified world of funeral doom…and transformed it into something all their own. With a focus on late 19th century whaling and nautical literature, particularly those tomes of a dark…

The 1970s. A turbulent and important time, marked by the decline and fall of the hippie movement that took the world by storm with the 1966 "summer of love" and introduced several generations to alternative religions and new age spirituality...often enough landing on some spectrum of the occult. But the spirit of Woodstock and the ethos of peace, l…

Born in Paris in the early 1930s, Roman Polanski lived a life marked by many tragedies. From seeing both parents taken away to the camps during the Nazi occupation of Poland and forced to live with a series of clandestine foster families to a later youth under the equally horrific oppression of Communist Russia and the Poland of the Iron Curtain, h…

Hail Hydra! Immortal Hydra! Cut off a limb and two more shall take its place! No, we're not doing another superhero cinema and television show, but making an apt metaphor about the neverending horror story that is MAGA and the pernicious spread of Trumpism in the corridors of American power. Despite effectively cutting the hydra off at the head in …

Tonight, we’re doing something different. Rather than tackling a genre, director or actor, we’re actually going to take on a fictional character as represented in film. Raymond Chandler was a dual citizen of the UK and US who turned to writing when he lost his job as an oil exec in the Great Depression. In addition to co-scripting Double Indemnity …

We’d talked the early, more progressively minded SF of Charlton Heston in a recent show, and the life and career of the ubiquitous Roddy MacDowall not very long ago. One series of films notable for featuring both iconic actors in primary roles remained glossed over, however, despite spurring a personal revisitation of the original 5 film run after …

Born and raised in the Bronx, Stanley Kubrick started off as a photographer for magazines noted for such like Look, and that’s something that carried through in most dramatic fashion in his subsequent film career. Almost uniquely in Hollywood, he managed to move from totally self-produced outsider cinema to decades funded by more traditional channe…

It's hard to believe in the modern age of sheer bombast and explosion filled CG lightshows for their own sake, but not that long ago, the world of science fiction, yes, even that of the American cinema, tended to be devoted to a very different purpose and aesthetic. Like their low paid visionary scribes from the likes of Welles and Verne in the 180…

This week, join us as we speak to pioneering all-femme Japanese hard rock/heavy metal band Show-Ya! Dropping no less than 8 solid albums of smooth yet punchy keyboard and guitar driven hard rock leaning ever more towards metal between 1985 and 1990, bluesy frontwoman Keiko Terada and "the three Mikis" ("Captain" Nakamura, "Sun-Go" Igarashi and "Mit…

Starring in at least 12 films that are or have been associated with the Film Noir genre (a retroactive designation courtesy of France’s Cahiers du Cinema crowd covering American B pictures with cynical, compromised heroes, vicious femme fatales and a gialloesque immersion in a dark underworld where all is not as it seems and everyone is guilty and …

Born in abject poverty to a Hungarian immigrant tailor, a young Bernie Schwartz learned one of life's most important lessons at a tender age: you can't rely on anyone but yourself. Making his way through adversities of language, impoverishment, deaths of loved ones and even a stint in an orphanage, he turned things around after service in the milit…

While you were all out busy churchin' and pretending to be all religious and whatnot and dragging the brats to creepy furries in bunny suits at cheesy smalltown egg hunts, the Maven of Sleaze and yours truly were havin' us a meetin'! Hallelujah! With all the tentside revival of an ersatz campside clergy, two dark but loveable souls convened to chat…

A former railway clerk and wireless operator for the RAF, he came out of WWII to build a career as a manically nervous, occasionally imperious and often downright perverse character actor in a stunning range of film and television appearances across any number of genres. In fact, he's done so much work, he could almost be compared to Jess Franco wi…

A former railway clerk and wireless operator for the RAF, he came out of WWII to build a career as a manically nervous, occasionally imperious and often downright perverse character actor in a stunning range of film and television appearances across any number of genres. In fact, he's done so much work, he could almost be compared to Jess Franco wi…

Holy Orange Goblins and Commie Turtles, Batman, this year of horrors JUST. WON'T. DIE. wait, wha? It's a new year, you say? Sure enough, it's the eve of Kiss Our Collective Ass Day to the Madman Formerly Known as...well, 45. We haven't had an actual President since 2016... But even now, at the dawn of a hard fought, embittered struggle towards new …

Ah, Corona, the gift that keeps on giving. The more it hangs around, the more we all get tired of social distancing and staying cooped up in our individual caves...and the more casual we get, the more we're persuaded to pretend we can all go back to "business as usual", the more it spreads. Most amusingly, straight to the White House who trumpets h…

Like him or not, Burt Reynolds left a formative decade in cowboy films and television to become one of the biggest box office draws (and objects of female lust) of the 70’s. With a nearly unbroken string of box office smashes, he showed up in everything from Woody Allen and Mel Brooks comedies to sports melodrama, from movies built entirely around …

Geez, a month and a half and still no word from the Weird Scenes front? Well, you know us, we can't just leave our faithful fans and fearless followers hanging like that! So driving at high speed on ice and flying by the seat of our pants without a harness, here we come again, without even the slightest of background notes, structure or plan, pulli…

And now for something completely different... With the ever worsening community spread and resulting hibernation lockdown were all facing globally, business as usual is proving to be decidedly unusual...if not pretty much impossible. Don't worry, though, we're not going anywhere...and in the meantime, we've pulled together this missive from the bun…

Back at the dawn of the millenium, still riding high and flush with the runaway success of Buffy (and to a lesser extent, its weird spinoff Angel) and not long before his foray into comics as writer of one of the bigger X-Men titles, Joss Whedon struck gold of a sort with perhaps the most viral and notable of his fan favorites: Firefly. While havin…

This Sunday, February 9, join us for Week 94 of Third Eye Cinema with the living legend herself, Doro Pesch! Surviving a near fatal bout with illness, she decided at the ripe old age of 16 that she would devote her remaining years to music...a choice she never relented on, even in the darkest days of grunge. Releasing four classic albums with the b…

One of the most recognizable names in blaxploitation, and we’re not even talking about one of the guys. Starting off as a receptionist and switchboard operator, she was quickly snapped up to feature roles in five of the earliest Women in Prison films for Roger Corman, where she impressed enough in a series of soundalike roles to work her way into c…

Sunday, February 2, join us for Week 92 as Third Eye Cinema...goes straight into Moving Towards Light territory. Tonight, we’re doing something very different. This is not your typical Third Eye interview, so be warned... We'll be holding one of our patented informal fireside chats with a musician, founder and former distro owner of one of black me…

With a colorful background and love of fast living, his real life exploits put to shame anything seen in his films. A noted motocross aficionado and racecar driver, Steve McQueen was born of Scotch roots in the throes of the Great Depression to a flying circus stunt flyer who abandoned him at an early age. Difficult family relations led to a hardsc…

Born right here in NYC at the very cusp of the Fin de Siecle, Christmas Day 1899, Humphrey DeForest Bogart came from a moneyed family as the scion of an early feminist suffragette. Intended to be brought up in "proper society", he blew his shot at Yale by tossing the headmaster into a local pond - his penchant for two fisted belligerence and a tast…

Born in Brooklyn, the former Carmine Orrico started out as an old school studio contract player, starring in healthily budgeted but forgettable films alongside the likes of Mamie Van Doren, Esther Williams, Sal Mineo, Fay Wray, Jimmy Stewart, Fabian and Sandra Dee as a succession of JDs, teen idols and romantic interests, before carving out somethi…