Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  The Fury (1978)   Brian De Palma's immediate follow-up to “Carrie” (1976) it shared a theme, teenagers with destructive Telekinetic powers (and in this case, also Telepathy) and it also carries over some of “Carrie’s” talented cast and crew. Of the many notable things about the movie was that despite this, it was distinctly its own film.   While “Carrie” concerned High School hazing and Domestic Abuse, “The Fury” embraced the Paranoias of country reeling from the ever-worsening revelations of the criminality and blood-thirstiness of America’s Intelligence Agencies demonstrated by the Watergate Scandal and subsequent Church Committee. Though solidly within the SF/Horror genre it actually shared more with Espionage films like “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) than any other SF/Horror I can think of, including others that combined the themes of Political Conspiracy and PSI powers like “Scanners” (1981).   Though an inferior film to “Carrie” it is still a...

  Frenzy (1972)   The film opens with a credit sequence that features a long helicopter shot following the Thames River, going under London’s Tower Bridge, and then closes in on a public speech by some nameless Politian. The score (by Ron Goodwin) is triumphant sounding, and given that the audience must know what kind of movie this is, it more than a little incongruous.   The music is a bit of a in-joke, actually a double-joke: first it is a symphonic fanfare welcoming the greatest film Director in English history, Alfred Hitchcock, back home (this would be his first film made in England in about twenty years, only his third since he moved to Hollywood about fifty years prior), and secondly, it is very much the kind of music you’d find in a film produced by a tourist board, but the politician’s speech is about pollution in the Thames, and the bulk of the rest of the film unfolds in over-crowded, dingy and smelly, low-to-middle-class neighborhood of Covent Garden...

  The Fly (1958)     Though Supernatural thrillers didn’t disappear, 1950s Horror-cinema seemed dominated with SF themes. This was a reversal, almost all SF except children’s serials had disappeared after 1936 and didn’t re-emerge until 1950. But in the post-WWII era there was a monster-craze that reflected the increasing anxieties of the seemingly all-powerful magic of emerging Science, most importantly the Atom Bomb, but also Space Exploration and a million other transformative and seemingly incomprehensible things.   The decade was defined by the work of Director Jack Arnold, who redeemed Universal Studios and brought the genre in new territory, but there was also a longing for lost glories, the Golden Age of Universal Monsters from 1923s and 1941, which were the movies that the filmmakers of the 1950s grew up with. As it happens, Arnold, working at Universal, created one of the decade’s great examples of trying to move the genre forward while simultan...