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Tom Selleck is closing the book on the latest chapter of his long career. Since 2010, the actor has been a regular fixture on CBS on Friday nights, playing NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan on Blue Bloods.

Blue Bloods wraps up its 14-season run on Dec. 13. Ahead of the highly anticipated series finale, let’s look back on the career of the iconic leading man.

Tom Selleck in ‘Daughters of Satan’ | FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images)

Selleck’s Hollywood career began after he appeared on The Dating Game while he was a student at the University of Southern California in the 1960s. That led to parts in commercials, TV shows such as Lancer, and movies like Myra Breckenridge. One of his first starring roles was in the 1972 horror movie Daughters of Satan.

[L-r] Tom Selleck with Anjanette Comer in ‘The Wide World of Mystery’; A 1976 ad featuring Selleck | American Broadcasting Companies via...

Robert Klane, who wrote the screenplays for the irreverent comedy classics Weekend at Bernie’s and Where’s Poppa? and directed the disco-era favorite Thank God It’s Friday, has died. He was 81.

Klane died Tuesday in his Woodland Hills home of kidney failure after a long illness, his son Jon Klane announced.

He wrote for the films Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972), Fire Sale (1977), The Man With One Red Shoe (1985), National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985), Unfaithfully Yours (1984), Walk Like a Man (1987) and Folks! (1992).

Among his TV writing credits were six episodes of M*A*S*H* and The Odd Couple: Together Again, a 1973 reunion telefilm starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall that he also directed. He also wrote and produced Tracey Takes On…, winning an Emmy for his work in 1997.

“Bob had a brilliant comedy mind that went deeper and deeper to get to the truth,” Rob Reiner, an actor in Where’s Poppa? (1970), said in a statement.

It’s a big international action epic, filmed in Mexico with a French director. Anthony Quinn is an 18th-century bandit who liberates a Mexican hamlet from marauding Yaqui Indians and a villainous Charles Bronson. Quinn is good, and all the necessary elements are present: fights, handsome scenery and a big battle… but it’s fairly tepid stuff, simplified and prettified. Leave it to Ennio Morricone’s epic music score to bind it all together. With Anjanette Comer, Sam Jaffe, Silvia Pinal and the same fifteen or so well-connected actors that cornered roles in all big Mexican films made with foreign money.

Guns for San Sebastian

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 111 min. / La bataille de San Sebastian / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date June 15, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: Anthony Quinn, Anjanette Comer, Charles Bronson, Sam Jaffe, Silvia Pinal, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Jaime Fernández, Rosa Furman, Leon Askin, Ivan Desny, Pedro Armendáriz Jr.,...

While October is officially just days away now, we have another batch of excellent genre home media releases in the meantime to help get us ready for the best month of the year. Scream Factory has put together an incredible box set for the [Rec] series that fans will definitely want to add to their personal collections, and for those who have made the upgrade, John Carpenter’s original Halloween makes its debut in 4K this week.

Arrow Video has put together a Special Edition release for The Baby, and for those of you who may have missed it earlier this year, Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich heads to multiple formats on Tuesday. Both The Swarm (1978) and The Cyclops (1957) head to HD for the first time ever courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, and there’s a bevy of cult classics headed to both Blu-ray and DVD from the likes...

“Maybe you think too much. When it comes to Baby, I do all the thinking.”

The Baby (1973) will be available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video September 25th

Still traumatized by the loss of her husband, well-meaning social worker Ann Gentry throws herself into her latest assignment: the case of Baby , a 21-year-old man with the mind of an infant who crawls, cries and has yet to make it out of nappies. But Baby s family the tyrannical Mama Wadsworth and her two demented daughters aren’t the only ones with a warped conception of familial relations, and the full horror only begins when Ann sets her sights on liberating the drooling man-child… and in so doing unleashes the wrath of the Wadsworth women.

45 years after its original release, this film remains one of the most bizarre horror movies ever committed to celluloid. Directed by Ted Post and co-starring Marianna Hill,...

(See previous post: “Gay Pride Movie Series Comes to a Close: From Heterosexual Angst to Indonesian Coup.”) Ken Russell's Valentino (1977) is notable for starring ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as silent era icon Rudolph Valentino, whose sexual orientation, despite countless gay rumors, seems to have been, according to the available evidence, heterosexual. (Valentino's supposed affair with fellow “Latin Lover” Ramon Novarro has no basis in reality.) The female cast is also impressive: Veteran Leslie Caron (Lili, Gigi) as stage and screen star Alla Nazimova, ex-The Mamas & the Papas singer Michelle Phillips as Valentino wife and Nazimova protégée Natacha Rambova, Felicity Kendal as screenwriter/producer June Mathis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), and Carol Kane – lately of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fame. Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) is notable as one of the greatest musicals ever made. As a 1930s Cabaret presenter – and the Spirit of Germany – Joel Grey was the year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner. Liza Minnelli...

Turner Classic Movies' 2017 Gay Pride film series comes to a close this evening and tomorrow morning, Thursday–Friday, June 29–30, with the presentation of seven movies, hosted by TV interviewer Dave Karger and author William J. Mann, whose books include Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines and Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969. Among tonight's movies' Lgbt connections: Edward Albee, Tony Richardson, Evelyn Waugh, Tab Hunter, John Gielgud, Roddy McDowall, Linda Hunt, Harvey Fierstein, Rudolf Nureyev, Christopher Isherwood, Joel Grey, and Tommy Kirk. Update: Coincidentally, TCM's final 2017 Gay Pride celebration turned out to be held the evening before a couple of international events – and one non-event – demonstrated that despite noticeable progress in the last three decades, gay rights, even in the so-called “West,” still have a long way to go. In Texas, the state's – all-Republican – Supreme Court decided that married gays should be treated as separate and unequal. In...

Only in the ‘70s, man, only in the ‘70s. Long before PC culture invaded popular entertainment, movies were the haven of the taboo, a safe house for ideas two steps from the norm. Now, many of these films of perversion were relegated to grindhouse theatres and the third feature of a Dusk Til Dawn showing at your local Drive-In. But occasionally a film will crawl towards the mainstream and plop itself down, bawling for attention. The Baby (1973) is one such film, so twisted in conception that it’s hard to believe it would be released in any decade. Except the ‘70s of course, where you could even get the director of a Dirty Harry and a Planet of the Apes flick to helm it.

Distributed by Scotia International in March, The Baby was given a limited theatrical release; and that’s really for the best – as much as the film...

The Loved One

Blu-ray

Warner Archives

1965 / B&W / 1:85 / / 122 min. / Street Date May 9, 2017

Starring: Robert Morse, Jonathan Winters, Anjanette Comer.

Cinematography: Haskell Wexler

Film Editor: Hal Ashby, Brian Smedley-Aston

Written by Terry Southern, Christopher Isherwood

Produced by Martin Ransohoff (uncredited), John Calley, Haskell Wexler

Directed by Tony Richardson

Funeral Director: Before you go, I was just wondering… would you be interested in some extras for the loved one?

Next Of Kin: What kind of extras?

Funeral Director: Well, how about a casket?

Mike Nichols and Elaine May – The $65 Dollar Funeral

That routine, a classic example of what was known in the early 60’s as “sick humor”, was nevertheless ubiquitous across mainstream variety shows like Ed Sullivan and Jack Paar. It also popularized the notion of a new boutique industry, the vanity funeral. The novelist Evelyn Waugh, decidedly less mainstream, documented the beginning of that phenomenon over a decade earlier with The Loved One,...

This week’s Blu-ray and DVD releases are an eclectic bunch, to say the least. Not only is Steve Miner’s criminally overlooked horror/comedy creature feature Lake Placid swimming its way onto Blu-ray, but Severin Films is also releasing a trio of controversial cult classics- Bloody Moon, The Baby and Bloody Birthday-all in high definition for the first time ever.

The Time Machine is also getting a Blu-ray release this week, along with Gareth Evans’ stunning action masterpiece The Raid 2 and a handful of indie horror films, including the wickedly entertaining horror musical Stage Fright starring Minnie Driver and Meat Loaf. Overall, it’s a good week to be a genre fan with oddball tastes because there’s a whole lot of wonderfully weird stuff arriving this Tuesday.

Spotlight Titles:

The Baby (Severin Films, Blu-ray)

An A-list director. A jaw-dropping storyline. And depraved depictions of suburban violence,...

Conscious-free kids who kill, a man living like a baby, and a killer stalking Spanish schoolgirls: Severin Films is plucking these three stories from the old-school horror shelf and bringing them to Blu-ray this summer, and we have the release details for you now.

Set for a July 8th home media release, the Blu-ray releases of 1981′s Bloody Birthday, 1973′s The Baby, and 1981′s Bloody Moon should excite fans of these grindhouse films and bring new viewers in, as well. Here are the release details from Severin Films:

Bloody Birthday Blu-ray:

“Get ready for the rarely seen slasher classic from the ’80s that may also be the most disturbing ‘killer kids’ movies in grindhouse history: Three babies are simultaneously born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse. Ten years later, these adorable youngsters suddenly begin a kiddie killing spree of stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings and beyond.

It's always an exciting thing when horror flicks hit Blu-ray for the very first time, and Severin Films has three such debuts in store for us on July 8, inviting us to a Bloody Birthday, allowing us to hold The Baby, and encouraging us to howl at the Bloody Moon.

Read on for complete release details for all three!

Bloody Birthday Synopsis

Get ready for the rarely seen slasher classic from the 80s that may also be the most disturbing "killer kids" movies in grindhouse history: Three babies are simultaneously born in the same hospital at the peak of a full solar eclipse. Ten years later, these adorable youngsters suddenly begin a kiddie killing spree of stranglings, shootings, stabbings, beatings, and beyond. Can the town's grown-ups stop these pint-sized serial killers before their blood-soaked birthday bash? K.C. Martel (E.T., "Growing Pains"), Joe Penny ("Jake and The Fat Man"), Michael Dudikoff (American Ninja...

The Baby

Directed by Ted Post

Written by Aby Polsky

USA, 1973

Shocking and unsettling in breaking a number social taboos, this forgotten gem centres on the kind of dysfunctional family seldom depicted on screen. The Baby is a politically-incorrect pseudo horror film about motherly love gone horribly wrong.

Our story follows a recently widowed social worker (Anjanette Comer) who investigates a strange case of child abuse and discovers a grown man (David Manzy) has been held in a state of infantile his entire life. The grown man still behaves like a baby, dressed in diapers, unable to speak and under the full dependance and care of a mother and her two teenage daughters. The social worker becomes increasinly obsessed with Baby, fearful for his wellbeing under the manipulative, psychotically abusive family who control and torture him for their own benefit.

Ted Post’s The Baby is surely one of the...

Directed by: Dean Hargrove

Written by: Dean Hargrove, Gabriel Dell

Cast: Gabriel Dell, Will Geer, Anjanette Comer, Joyce Van Patten, Vincent Gardenia, Barbara Harris, Jackie Coogan, Huntz Hill

For movie fans of all genres, Mod (Made on Demand) DVDs are both a blessing and a curse. While it's true DVD-r technology makes it possible for collectors to own a physical copy of movies that wouldn't otherwise warrant a full-scale release, it also allows the studios to sell any film hiding in the corner of a film vault. And that would be fine if it wasn’t for the premium price tag attached to the finished product.

Taking a risk by purchasing an unknown film can be costly, as you might be buying a film better suited for a Walmart dump bin, which is where The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery belongs. Despite the script's best intentions, and a cast filled...

DVD Playhouse—February 2012

By Allen Gardner

To Kill A Mockingbird 50th Anniversary Edition (Universal) Robert Mulligan’s film of Harper Lee’s landmark novel pits a liberal-minded lawyer (Gregory Peck) against a small Southern town’s racism when defending a black man (Brock Peters) on trumped-up rape charges. One of the 1960s’ first landmark films, a truly stirring human drama that hits all the right notes and isn’t dated a bit. Robert Duvall makes his screen debut (sans dialogue) as the enigmatic Boo Radley. DVD and Blu-ray double edition. Bonuses: Two feature-length documentaries: Fearful Symmetry and A Conversation with Gregory Peck; Featurettes; Excerpts and film clips from Gregory Peck’s Oscar acceptance speech and AFI Lifetime Achievement Award; Commentary by Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 2.0 mono.

Outrage: Way Of The Yakuza (Magnolia) After a brief hiatus from his signature oeuvre of Japanese gangster flicks,...

Los Angeles: It’s this Saturday!

Larry Karaszewski is a busy man, but that hasn’t stopped him from presenting great screenings of great films. As part of that ongoing series of impossibly cool American Cinematheque screenings, Larry Karaszewski will host Tony Richardson’s hilarious, morbid comedy The Loved One at the Egyptian Theater on Saturday, February 4.

So sayeth The Cinematheque:

Marketed as “the motion picture with something to offend everyone!” this achingly funny, pitch-black comedy could only have been released in the anything-goes era of the 1960s. Judged unfilmable for more than a decade (Luis Buñuel was trying to set it up for years), writer Evelyn Waugh’s spot-on satire of Southern California – specifically the funeral business – finally was brought to the screen in the mid-’60s by director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) with a screenplay by Terry Southern (Candy, Easy Rider) and Christopher Isherwood (!). Robert Morse, a British...

The 70s were a great time for movies. Filmmakers experimented and created some of cinema history’s greatest classics. The Baby, released in 1973, while not one of these classics is still worth mentioning. Now regarded as a cult classic, this weird and twisted horror-thriller has a story that will probably stay with you for quite some time.

The Wadsworth family consists of a single matriarch (Ruth Roman), two daughters and one Baby. The Baby I’m referring to is actually the name of a twenty-something man (David Mooney) with the mental capacity of an infant. A social worker named Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer) learns of Baby and develops a special interest in his case. As Ann gets closer to Baby, she becomes emotionally attached to him. This angers Mrs. Wadsworth who is extremely overprotective of Baby and soon, bizarre events start to take place.

Read more...

A quick recommendation of a new DVD of an old cult film: 1973's "The Baby," from director Ted Post. The story is sort of "Cinderella" if instead of forcing Cinderella to do manual labor, the wicked stepmother and stepsisters brutalized her into pretending she was a giant overgrown baby so they could suckle off the government teat by collecting her welfare checks. There's no Prince Charming in this version, but there is a charming social worker who believes the "baby" (whose name is, well, Baby) is being mistreated and abused and is capable of acting like the adult he physically is.

For the life of me I can't figure out how this film came to exist. A world in which no one but a single social worker is concerned or even skeptical about the "Grey Gardens" nutjobs and their adult baby son? Even her bosses at the welfare offices tell...

DVD Playhouse June 2011

By

Allen Gardner

Kiss Me Deadly (Criterion) Robert Aldrich’s 1955 reinvention of the film noir detective story is one of cinema’s great genre mash-ups: part hardboiled noir; part cold war paranoid thriller; and part science- fiction. Ralph Meeker plays Mickey Spillane’s fascist detective Mike Hammer as a narcissistic simian thug, a sadist who would rather smash a suspect’s fingers than make love to the bevvy of beautiful dames that cross his path. In fact, the only time you see a smile cross Meeker’s sneering mug is when he’s doling out pain, with a vengeance. When a terrified young woman (Cloris Leachman, film debut) literally crossed Hammer’s path one night, and later turns up dead, he vows to get to the bottom of her brutal demise. One of the most influential films ever made, and perhaps the most-cited film by the architects...

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Cinema Retro columnist Tom Lisanti has paired with actress Gail Gerber to write her fascinating autobiography that details her experiences in Hollywood as a young starlet in the 1960s as well as her career as a writer and Terry Southern's longtime companion. The book, Trippin' With Terry Southern, is due out in June. Here is an excerpt:

Hollywood, summer of 1964. I had been living in California for almost a year now and still felt like a fish out of water. Growing up in Canada where I studied ballet from the time I was a small child, Los Angeles was mystifying to me with its palm trees, bright sunlight forever contrasting with the deep shade, and its superficial inhabitants. But I readily admit I was sort of a snob myself and didn’t know...

You can’t beat late night television to catch some of the oddities of the film world. Series’ like Moviedrome and Mondo Macabro presented some weird and wonderful films, but sheer scheduling alone would bring the occasional strange delight our way. The only bonus of insomnia was that I’d never miss these films when they were on and it’s how I got into loving film, the veritable B-movie banquet that was the early hours So, here are my choices of five late night TV gems:

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (1973) Now you see them, now you don’t…now you die

Be afraid, be very afraid in this very effective made-for-tv movie which has already made an entry in fistinface’s ‘Five: TV Movies Not About Eating Disorders’. I love cheesy TV movies but this is the rare thing of a darker, more original film and...

• Screamkings Productions has announced that its new shocker Frat House Massacre (pictured) will have its first U.S. screening next Wednesday, February 4. It’ll be showing at New York City’s Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue) as part of the NewFilmmakers New York series.

The movie begins at 8 p.m., and director Alex Pucci and cast members Jon Fleming, Niki Notarile and Rane Jameson will attend and hold a Q&A. Scripted by Draven Gonzalez, Frat House Massacre is supposedly based on true events and is set in 1979, following two brothers as they join the Delta Iota fraternity and find themselves enmeshed in sex, drugs and brutal hazing that leads to torture and murder. Veteran Italian composer Claudio Simonetti provided the score. You can check out the movie’s official website here.

• While it continues to search for a distributor, Jim Isaac’s new film Pig Hunt has been set...

• Dimension Extreme gave Fango a first look at the cover art for Eden Lake, the killer-youth chiller it releases January 6 with Genius Products. As we previously reported, the disc will include commentary by writer/director James Watkins and a making-of featurette, retailing for $19.97 (with a Blu-ray also coming for $29.95). See Fango #279, on sale in December, for an Eden Lake set visit.

• Ariztical Entertainment revealed to us the full specs for its disc of Gay Bed & Breakfast Of Terror, streeting November 18 (following select theatrical playdates that began this past Friday). Presented in 16x9-enhanced widescreen with stereo sound, the movie will be accompanied by:

• Audio commentary by writer/director Jaymes Thompson, actors Mari Marks and Robert Borzych and postproduction crew Tim Kelley

• Behind-the-scenes featurette

• Fruitcake short film

• Outtakes

• Music video

Retail price is $29.95.

• Media Blasters provided us with cover art (temporary in a couple of cases) and details on a bunch of its winter titles.