Bill Thurman Movies

In this campy sci-fi adventure, an obsessed Nazi inventor devises a time machine that will allow him to bring Hitler into the present. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Set during the tempestuous mid '60s, this drama seeks to expose the darkest aspects of a contemporary upper class family as it tells the story of a 17-year-old light skinned African American who decides to pass herself off as a white girl. She gets a job working in the home of a powerful movie mogul. Everything seems hunky-dory on the surface, but it doesn't take her long to learn the sordid truth about the man's troubled family. The wife is a sniveling hypochondriac, a promiscuous hellion for a daughter, and a son who was booted out of West Point after he was falsely accused of homosexuality. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this campy sci-fi film, the hero and his little band of post nuclear holocaust survivors find themselves stalked by telepathic cannibal mutants. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this sci-fi film, lonely Martians wire Earth in hopes of finding fertile women to repopulate their dying world. They are particularly interested in a voluptuous dancing scientist. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This obscure horror movie is a remake of an even more obscure horror movie, 1964's The Demon From Devil's Lake. The sheriff of a small Texas town investigates when a serial killer starts bumping off female students at a local college. He discovers that the murderer is not a serial killer at all, but a hideous monster, the result of a botched NASA experiment. ~ Brian Gusse, All Movie Guide

Produced by Hollywood iconoclast BBS Productions, film critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film pays homage to Hollywood's classical age as it chronicles generational rites of passage in Anarene, a fictional one-horse Texas town. In 1951, high school seniors Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) play football, go to the movies at the Royal Theater, hang out at the pool hall owned by local elder statesman Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), and lust after rich tease Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd in her film debut). As the year passes, Sonny learns about the pitfalls and compromises of adulthood through an affair with his coach's wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) and a thwarted elopement with Jacy after she dumps Duane. Following two tragic deaths, and with Duane gone to Korea and Jacy packed off to college in Dallas, Sonny is left behind in Anarene, wise enough to absorb the life lessons of Sam the Lion and Jacy's mother Lois (Ellen Burstyn). He is determined to honor Sam's legacy as the town's conscience, despite a telling sign of incipient communal disintegration: the closing of the Royal Theater after a final showing of Howard Hawks's Red River. Paying tribute to classical Hollywood directors like Hawks and John Ford, Bogdanovich used old-time cinematographer Robert Surtees and shot The Last Picture Show in crisp black-and-white, with a restrained style devoid of the kind of "new wave" techniques (jump cuts, zooms, and jittery hand-held camerawork) used by such contemporaries as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, and Martin Scorsese. As in such Ford films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Bogdanovich relies on careful visual composition in deep focus to help communicate the regret over the passing of an era. Hailed as one of the best films by a young director since Citizen Kane (1941), The Last Picture Show premiered at the New York Film Festival and went on to become a hit. It was also nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay for Larry McMurtry's and Bogdanovich's adaptation of McMurtry's novel. John Ford stalwart Johnson won Supporting Actor and Leachman won Supporting Actress, beating out their cohorts Bridges and Burstyn. For an audience steeped in movie history and caught up in the chaotic 1971 present, The Last Picture Show presented a nostalgic look backward that was not so much an escape from the present as a coming to terms with what the present had lost. Its 1990 sequel Texasville, in which Bridges and Shepherd played later incarnations of their original characters, was not as successful. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Based on the novel by Wilson Rawls, this film follows the events that befall a young Oklahoma farm boy as he, with the help of his two beloved hounds, struggles to help his family get by in the hard times of the 1930s. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

In this action film, a large cache of drugs has been concealed somewhere in the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and it will make a rich reward for the group who finds it first. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

In this "B" movie that falls between the cracks of mainstream vs. cult production (not rich enough for the former or sick enough for the latter), Claudia Jennings stars as Desirée, a tough Cajun huntress looking out for her younger brother and sister when three men and two of their sons come hunting for her, believing she killed the son of one of them. In the process of avoiding capture, Desirée's sister is victimized by the hunters, and the Cajun woman vows revenge -- first by luring them ever deeper into the swamp, and then by exacting her own deadly justice when the opportunity arises. In an era in which women had very few leading action roles in films, Jennings was setting a pattern for the future wave of female action stars. She was already a cult figure before her 1979 death at the age of 29 in a car crash. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

When Bigfoot is sighted near a Louisiana lake, two college students (Dennis Fimple, John David Carson) camp out to confirm the legendary monster's identity. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

In a spin off from the actual event of U.S. President Kennedy's assassination, this drama examines what the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald may have been like had he not been shot by Jack Ruby. This made-for-television movie was aired in two parts. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide

The longest (26-1/2 hours), most expensive ($25 million) and most complicated (four directors, five producers, five cinematographers, almost 100 speaking parts, several hundred extras) project made for television up to that time, Centennial was shown in two- and three-hour installments over a period of four months. An adaptation of James Michener's best-selling novel, it told the story of the settling of the American West by looking at the founding of the fictional town of Centennial, Colorado, from the settling of the area in the late 18th century to the present. Emmy-nominated for film editing and art direction, it boasts of sterling performances from Richard Chamberlain as frontiersman Alexander McKeag, Robert Conrad as the French-Canadian trapper Pasquinel, and a surprisingly powerful performance from former football star Alex Karras as compassionate but iron-willed immigrant farmer Hans Brumbaugh. ~ Brian Gusse, All Movie Guide

This unsettling but moody low-budget psycho-thriller -- a drive-in version of Repulsion with a Southern Gothic flavor -- stars the eerie-looking Camilla Carr as a demented young recluse who believes herself to be possessed by the spirit of her long-lost brother (who is presumed dead), and slays any man who makes sexual advances toward her -- usually running them through with a sword. Her dementia intensifies, leading her to take her own life by chewing on broken glass (a particularly unsettling scene). The chief plot twist and subsequent dramatic punchline -- involving the brother's true identity and whereabouts -- is a long time coming, but fairly satisfying nonetheless. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide