Shadows in an Empty Room
At a party with her good-for-nothing college friends, an Ottawa cop’s sister is poisoned to death. The cop, Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman), is a Canadian Dirty Harry in this 1976 American International Pictures production and he has a death wish when it comes to finding her killer. Along the way he battles an angry gang of transsexuals and is locked in a genuinely dangerous-looking metal-on-metal car chase. Martin Landau co-stars as the sister’s philandering physician.
I Saw What You Did
Before caller ID, telephones were an anonymous tool of harassment. In I Saw What You Did (1965), a pair of callow teenage girls and an annoying toddler sister spend the night making prank calls, only to connect with a psychotic killer. Everything about the movie is bad, including its unsubtle rip-offs of Psycho and Rear Window, but it merits a historic footnote for a good performance by Joan Crawford in the winter of her career.
“The Red Skelton Show: The Best of the Early Years 1955-1958”
Red Skelton looked as if he enjoyed his work. In these 20 episodes collected on DVD from his 1950s television show, Skelton often cracked up at his own jokes and looked—at times—as if he made it up as he went along. A marvelous pantomime, he did wordless sketches, making an impression of changing a tire funny. Skelton often played as an unkempt bedraggled bum, a talking second cousin to Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
