“Wagner, no! Stay in hell where you belong!”

Although he started out directing pretty straight forward films like Billion Dollar Brain & The Music Lovers, Ken Russell’s career took a turn for the surreal with 1971’s criminally under seen & underrated The Devils.

In 1975, he released two films featuring Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who. The first was a film adaptation of that band’s 1969 masterwork rock opera Tommy. The other is another under seen film, yet one that I would hesitate to call underrated: Lisztomania.

Despite being one of the most innovative and original voices in cinema for the last four decades, Terry Gilliam never seems to get a fair shake. His films have been met with all manner of disaster from facing endless production delays (virtually every film he’s made) to being blocked by a studio from release (Brazil) to the untimely death of one of his actors mid-shoot (Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). Even The Onion had a bit of fun with Gilliam’s reputation a few years back.

But one thing remains true, when his films do see the light of day, they are almost always fantastical visions of a world you simply cannot see anywhere else. One of his most under-seen, under-appreciated films is his 1989 fantasy film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is truly a one-of-a-kind experience.

In the early part of the last decade, American studios and directors began mining Japanese horror (or J-Horror) films and turning them into blockbusters stateside. Films like The Ring, The Grudge & Shutter seemed to return the American horror film to its more psychological roots. The success of the torture porn films like Saw & Hostel that followed made Hollywood abandon this trend, but one film that Hollywood never got around to (and thank goodness because I can only imagine how they would have screwed it up) is Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 Horror/Comedy masterpiece Hausu (House).

Read more about this Forgotten Film.

The year was 1980. Coming out of the 70’s (a decade which saw the emergence of no less directors than Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, and countless others) everyone was riding high, and the sky seemed to be the limit.

A director (Robert Altman) & producer (Robert Evans) whose careers skyrocketed in the 70’s decided to team up to bring a beloved cartoon character to life in a big screen musical, and they cast the hottest TV star of the day (Robin Williams) in his film debut.

What could possibly go wrong?

“The karma in here is so thick, you need an aqualung to breathe.”

In this new column, I’ll be examining some forgotten film favorites, namely ones that continue to wield a strong influence on today’s films and filmmakers. As the saying goes, everything old is new again, and directors are constantly looking for ways to reinvent the wheel while simultaneously honoring what came before them.

Director Brian DePalma has had a long and varied career, and no film embodies how versatile he is better than 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise, a campy, over-the-top, pop odyssey that is a modern retelling of Goethe’s Faust with equal parts Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Within five minutes, you’ll be able to tell whether or not you’re going to like it, and if you’re put off by the first musical number, it’s not going to get better for you anytime soon.