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From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.

Tuesday 9/6/11

8:45 PM Turner Classic Movies
I Walk Alone (1948 USA): Younger readers - say, those under 25 - may think this film is named after a Green Day song, but they’d be mistaken. I Walk Alone is actually a screen adaptation of a play by Theodore Reeves, and a good one at that. Directed by action and sci-fi specialist Byron Haskin, the film stars Burt Lancaster as Frankie Madison, a newly released ex-con looking to get his share of the proceeds from the alcohol he sold during Prohibition days. But times have changed, and with the demon rum now legal again, Frankie learns that former colleague Noll Turner (Kirk Douglas) isn’t so keen to stick to their previous 50-50 agreement. With Douglas and Lancaster on screen, you can imagine the amount of leering and teeth-gnashing that goes on. First-rate support comes courtesy sexy Lizabeth Scott, beanpole Wendell Corey, menacing Marc Lawrence, and resolutely unsexy man mountains Mike Mazurki and Brick Sullivan.

Wednesday 9/7/11

5:00 PM Sundance
PVC-1 (2007 COL): Remember that recent news story about an Australian schoolgirl who had a bomb attached to her by someone planning to blackmail her wealthy parents? Maybe the villain had been inspired by this Colombian thriller - which, apparently, was itself based on a true story! Like Robert Wise’s 1949 noir The Set-Up, PVC-1 takes place in "real-time": filmed in a single taut 85-minute take, it relates the terrifying tale of a farmer with a pipe-bomb clamped around her neck. Apparently, director Spiros Stathoulopoulos did endurance training for several months in order to prepare himself for the ordeal of shooting the film in one take. His efforts paid off: PVC-1 is an exciting thriller that clearly benefits from the real-time "gimmick."

9:00 PM Sundance
Hadewijch (2009 FRA): Oh, those naughty nuns! Ever since Jacques Rivette’s 1966 opus The Nun, Brides of Christ have been a popular staple of both exploitation and art-house cinema. Here’s one of the more recent genre entries, a Bruno Dumont-helmed think piece about a young nun (Julie Sokolowski) expelled from her convent for simply being too damn devout. Desperate to get intimate with God, our heroine goes in search of a spiritual experience, and finds it in the form of Nassir (Karl Sarafidis), a Muslim fundamentalist with some rather extreme views of his own. Together, they make beautiful apocalyptic music together! Hadewijch is definitely not easy viewing, but if you’re in the mood for something on the contemplative and/or spiritual side of the ledger, it’s worth a look.

Thursday 9/8/11

5:00 PM The Movie Channel
Giallo (2008 ITA): For those of you unfamiliar with the term giallo, it’s generally used as a genre pigeon-hole for films featuring gloved hands, knives, and deeply confusing and/or illogical plot developments. The style is considered to be the child of director Dario Argento (whose other child is actress Asia Argento) and took its name from a popular series of Italian pulp magazines, distinctively printed with yellow (giallo) covers. History lesson now out of the way, what of Giallo: The Movie? Well, it ain’t great, but it ain’t terrible, as is pretty standard operating procedure for any film headlined by Adrien Brody and directed by...Dario Argento! Brody plays Enzo Afolvi, a police inspector tasked with tracking down a kidnapped woman in Turin. Her sister (Emmanuelle Seigner) is convinced she’s still alive, but Afolvi is not so sure - he thinks she may have fallen prey to a serial killer known as (drum roll please) Giallo! Though far from classic Argento (you’ll have to check out 1973’s Deep Red for that), Giallo is at least entertaining and not quite as opaque as some of the filmmaker’s output. Also airs at 8:00 PM.

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