The collective experience of audiences in a cinema watching great films is at the heart what Park Circus is about. We love films, shared stories and escapism, and have asked some of our friends from across the film industry to recommend some of their favourite films for audiences to enjoy when it is safe for cinemas to reopen.
This week, we have an eclectic selection of films from novelist and critic Kim Newman that we hope will inspire you - and hopefully we'll be able to see all of these films on the big screen somewhere very soon.
Kim has published several works of fiction and non fiction including Nightmare Movies, Life’s Lottery, the Diogenes Club series, the Drearcliff Grange School series and the Anno Dracula series. Anno Dracula won the International Horror Critic’s Guild Award for Best Novel. He is a recipient of the Horror Writers of America’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Non Fiction as well as British Science Fiction Awards for Best Short Fiction and Best Collection. He also writes under the pseudonym, Jack Yeovil.
Here are my picks...
One of the great macho 80s action movies … soulful Patrick Swayze cleans up the sort of bar ‘where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing’.
A splendid Jules Verne adaptation with Vincent Price suitably saturnine as a Captain Nemo of the air, piloting his wonderful steampunk airship and bombing stock footage from historical films in an attempt to end war.
Master of the World (1961) - Image courtesy of MGM Studios
A leather-clad alien dominatrix and her clunky giant robot invade a pub in Scotland in search of virile men to repopulate her home planet … a masterpiece of the British aliens-down-the-pub sub-genre.
This musical is among my go-to cheer-up movies. A satire about Elvis and celebrity fandom, it has an astonishing turn from Ann-Margret as a teenage girl whose perkiness verges on possession and very deft song and dance stuff from Dick Van Dyke. Particularly exhilarating numbers include ‘The Telephone Hour’ (‘what’s the story, morning glory … what’s the tale, nightingale?’), ‘I Got a Lot of Living to Do’ and ‘Kids (Who Can Understand Anything They Say?)’.
Bye Bye Birdie (1963) - Image courtesy of Sony
A lurid adaptation of HG Wells’ Island of Dr Moreau, with Charles Laughton wielding a whip and licking his lips as a mad scientist who turns animals into near-humans … plus Bela Lugosi under a faceful of hair as the Sayer of the Law. Also with a very fetching Panther Girl.
Island of Lost Souls (1932) - Image courtesy of Universal
