Torture Garden (1967) – Another Amicus horror anthology, from a screenplay by Robert Bloch. Not unlike director Freddie Francis’s later anthology Tales From the Crypt, the framing story on this one is sorta kinda cautionary tales for the participants, all of whom are shown a possible future by carnival spookhouse proprietor Dr. Diablo (Burgess Meredith). Of particular note is Jack Palance playing against type (i.e., not a thug or palooka) as an obsessed Edgar Allan Poe collector, playing his scenes opposite equally obsessed Peter Cushing. Not the actors you normally imagine sharing the screen!
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) – Plenty of spidery fun, and a lot of homages to the comic-book format. Pity that most kids don’t even know what that is…
I just hope that we aren’t going to get caught in a rival continuity between the “official” MCU films featuring Spider-Man (which Marvel Studios produces and in which Sony still participates) and the animated Spider-Verse movies from Sony (which Sony produces and in which Marvel Studios participates, because everything’s stupid).
Mill of the Stone Women (1960) – Of a piece with the contemporary Hammer Films gothic-horror oeuvre, this Italian/French co-production features a well-reputed art professor and sculptor who, when he isn’t teaching at the university, lives and works in an old windmill (!) where he has fixed up the old clockwork carousel that plays music and displays the movable marionettes depicting women either committing violence (poisoners, etc.) or having violence committing against them (Joan of Arc, etc.). And no, the movie doesn’t treat that as being nearly bizarre as it should. The professor also has an ethereal and quite mad grown daughter (Scilla Gabel, buxom star of many eurocrime and sword-&-sandal epics), who fixates on the young studly journalist on hand doing research for the mill’s 100th anniversary. Also features Liana Orfei, last seen around these parts in Pirates of the Coast (1960).
Abandoned movies: Destiny (1921)