News

Grindhouse Releasing completes a journey of nearly 20 years with the recent Blu-ray releases of Duke Mitchell's Massacre Mafia Style and Gone With the Pope. Co-founders Bob Murawski and Sage Stallone began this saga back in the mid-'90s with the help of Anchor Bay/Blue Underground head honcho Bill Lustig. That's when they were introduced to the insanity of Massacre Mafia Style, courtesy of a rare VHS copy of a forgotten independent mafia film then titled The Executioner. After using their theatrical distribution arm to give new life to Massacre Mafia Style, Grindhouse began a quest to restore the film to the glory it deserves, and the final product is something quite special.  Duke Mitchell's left no real film legacy to speak of until Grindhouse took control...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Next week at Tfh we're featuring a modest tribute to Bela! ... Lugosi, of course. The films include Invisible Ghost (helmed by Gun Crazy's Joseph H. Lewis), 1947's Scared To Death, and the subject of today's Saturday Matinee, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. The sole reason for the existence of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla is Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. If anything, that considerably narrows down the blame for this 74 minute pleasure-killer from 1952. It was at the height of Martin and Lewis' extraordinary success in the early fifties (each appearance was a near riot, on stage and off, a bobbysoxer's version of Beatlemania) that a motley collection of crooners and comics rushed in to steal some of the limelight. None were so brazen (or motley) than the team of Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. Mitchell was an erstwhile lounge singer with a predilection for imitating smooth...

The name Duke Mitchell may not be recognizable to a lot of our readers, but fans of exploitation have probably heard of his first film as a writer/director, 1974’s Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. The next year he started filming a follow-up, then called Kiss the Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone with the Pope; however, Mitchell died before finishing the flick. Enter Grindhouse Releasing, which has undertaken a painstaking restoration.

In an interesting twist, in the same week that Gone with the Pope is having its world premiere (March 12th at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre), Grindhouse Releasing's co-owner, Bob Murawski, is up for his first Oscar as editor of The Hurt Locker. Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous!

While most folks up for the Academy Award this year have “skeletons in their closets” that they have tucked away in that dark, dark eternal...

The joy of cruising the movie margins is that one thing leads to another. So, a few years back, after I'd suffered through the 1952 Poverty Row comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for my bad-movie book, I couldn't help but get Googling to find out what happened to its leads, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose comic act in the movie aped Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the very limits of copyright infringement. Turned out that Sammy did not much moviewise after that (he died last year), but Duke burned bright in the last years of his life. Mitchell's first film as writer-director was 1974's Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. While it didn't make him a household name or set the box office aflame, in 1975 Mitchell set about making a second flick, then called Kiss The Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone With The Pope.