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It seems only natural that Severin Films would follow up its two Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee box sets with a collection of some of the more offbeat entries in the filmography of Peter Cushing, Lee’s legendary Hammer Films co-star. Cushing Curiosities collects five films and the remaining episodes of a TV series that highlight the diverse aspects of Cushing’s always authoritative on-screen persona. Featuring crisp new 2K restorations sourced from original elements, Severin’s compelling new set comes complete with loads of bonus materials, including some priceless audio interviews with the man himself and commentaries by historians, as well as Peter Cushing: A Portrait in Six Sketches, a 200-page book by film historian Jonathan Rigby.

Cushing appears as a stiff-necked yet urbane airline pilot in 1960’s Cone of Silence, a modestly compelling exposé based on the actual investigation into a 1952 airplane crash. Reprimanded for a crash that killed his copilot,...

Severin Films is celebrating the late Peter Cushing with an unprecedented box set highlighting the most unexpected gems from the filmography of the legendary horror actor.

Cushing Curiosities, releasing August 29, presents 6-discs of rarely seen feature films and television broadcasts restored and scanned from original vault sources, plus a curated plethora of Special Features that celebrate Cushing’s unique career like never before.

From Hammer Films to Star Wars, he remains one of genre films’ best-loved actors. Now celebrate six of the most unexpected, rarely seen and decidedly curious performances from the legendary career of Peter Cushing: Cushing delivers a rare villain turn in the 1960 aviation thriller Cone Of Silence. That same year, Cushing brought gentle dignity to The Boulting Brothers’ cold-war drama Suspect. In 1962’s The Man Who Finally Died, Cushing co-stars opposite Stanley Baker as a former Nazi hiding a grave post-war secret.

Cushing returns to his...

One could be forgiven for not suspecting that Hammer Films, known for their comparatively lurid and bloody, sometimes pointedly lusty, and otherwise vividly imagined (and reimagined) catalogue of horror classics, would be the first place to look if one were in the market for a low-key yet spirited take on a holiday classic to turn to once the perennial screenings of It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, Die Hard and countless other popular titles have begun to wear out their welcome. Yet the studio delivered just that in Cash on Demand (1962), a dandy and delicious suspense thriller directed by Quentin Lawrence, from a script by David T. Chantler and Lewis Griefer, itself based on a play by Jacques Gillies, which echoes of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the book and the countless movie and TV iterations which came before, to fresh and potent purpose.

Lawrence, a British TV veteran...

Horror changes with each generation. In the ‘50s, societal fear of the Atomic bomb was projected back at us through the use of metaphorical figures such as giant lizards, oversized sea-creatures, and warped representations of nature too often taken for granted. And then there’s fun fare like The Crawling Eye (1958), which posits that visitors from space don’t always come in peace, nor are they willing to go quietly. I guess films don’t always have to reflect society.

This British independent production was released at home under its original title The Trollenberg Terror (also the name of the 1956 BBC serial it is based on) in October with a stateside rollout at the end of the year; unloved by critics (and mocked by Mystery Science Theater 3000), the film satiated the drive-in circuit looking for cheap thrills and cheaper monsters. But The Crawling Eye offers up more - atmosphere,...

Hammer Film Productions ran itself on a loose set of commandments that had to be followed in all of their horror pictures. They obviously made more than that, often combing the fertile grounds of science fiction, sword-and-sandal affairs, and even the rare bank robbery, but their legacy is horror, and in those films you were going to see certain things. You could expect Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee (maybe both) duking it out in suave Gothic mansions or the quaint decor of a vampire’s crypt. You were going to see blood, sometimes lots of it, and women were going to wear beautiful, low-cut dresses that mostly existed to sing the praises of God-given cleavage. These were B-pictures, often trashy and always pulp, but behind the camera and in the heart of these movies is the single greatest output of house-style scares this side of Val Lewton’s cabal of...

Last year, New York's Quad Cinema paid tribute to Mario Bava with a 21-film, multi-day marathon, and this summer they're heating up the big screen once again with a two-part Hammer horror movies celebration, and we've been provided with the exclusive details on part 1 of their massive celebration of Hammer movies from 1956–1967.

Read the official press release below for all 32 titles (21 of which will be displayed in 35mm) in part 1 of the Quad's Hammer movie marathon, and keep an eye on their website for more information!

Press Release: May 30 - June 19 It's a chilling season at the Quad! Brace yourself for mummies, vampires, werewolves, and more with our extensive two-part retrospective celebrating Britain's genre studio powerhouse, Hammer Films

Throughout film history, many countries have had their own point-of-pride movie studios; Britain can claim several, whether as backlots or sites of creative capital. In Hammer Films, a genre-oriented counterpart to Ealing Films,...

I’m guessing that you, just like most of us, have always had seasonal favorites when it comes to movies that attempt to address and evoke the spirit of Christmas. Like most from my generation, when I was a kid I learned the pleasures of perennial anticipation of Christmastime as interpreted by TV through a series of holiday specials, like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and even musical variety hours where the likes of Bing Crosby and Andy Williams and Dean Martin et al would sit around sets elaborately designed to represent the ideal Christmas-decorated living room, drinking “wassail” (I’m sure that’s what was in those cups) and crooning classics of the season alongside a dazzling array of guests. (We knew we were moving into a new world of holiday cheer when David Bowie joined Bing Crosby for...

Humankind’s collision with otherworldly life forms can make for unforgettable cinema.

This article will highlight the best of live-action human vs. alien films. The creatures may be from other planets or may be non-demonic entities from other dimensions.

Excluded from consideration were giant monster films as the diakaiju genre would make a great subject for separate articles.

Readers looking for “friendly alien” films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953) and the comically overrated Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) are advised to keep watching the skies because they won’t find them here.

Film writing being the game of knowledge filtered through personal taste that it is, some readers’ subgenre favorites might not have made the list such as War of the Worlds (1953) and 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).

Now let’s take a chronological look at the cinema’s best battles between Us and Them.

We know the greats; movies like Metropolis (1927), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977).

And there are those films which maybe didn’t achieve cinematic greatness, but through their inexhaustible watchability became genre touchstones, lesser classics but classics nonetheless, like The War of the Worlds (1953), Godzilla (1954), Them! (1954), The Time Machine (1960).

In the realm of science fiction cinema, those are the cream (and below that, maybe the half and half). But sci fi is one of those genres which has often too readily leant itself to – not to torture an analogy — producing nonfat dairy substitute.

During the first, great wave of sci fi movies in the 1950s, the target audience was kids and teens. There wasn’t a lot in the way of “serious” sci fi. Most of it was churned out quick and cheap; drive-in fodder, grist for the Saturday matinee mill.

By the early 1960s,...