Page 21 - Screen Secrets News Today

It's got no music and no voiceover – but Victor Kossakovsky's documentary might be the most effective advert for a meat-free diet ever made

Double demonic possession, Catholic exorcism, and dog-grooming – the true story behind the new Conjuring film is even stranger than fiction

Andie MacDowell and Bruce Willis in Hudson Hawk Credit: Alamy “Smug Hudson Hawk looks like a turkey,” said the Chicago Tribune on May 24, 1991 – the day that Hudson Hawk opened in the US. Bruce Willis’s comedy caper had been in the firing line since long before it hit cinemas. The accusation of turkey-faced smuggery was fuelled by months’ worth of damning set reports: constant rewrites as the film was shot; the leading lady being mysterious recast; Bruce Willis and producer Joel Silve...

Provocative: Phoebe Cates and Rik Mayall in Drop Dead Fred Credit: Alamy On May 22 1991, American television saw an unlikely meeting of two great talents. The chat show host David Letterman’s guest was the British comedian Rik Mayall. He may have been a household name in his home country but Mayall was practically unknown, save to MTV viewers familiar with The Young Ones, in the United States. Their encounter made for excruciatingly embarrassing, car-crash television. Mayall had been invited...

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in Gigli Credit: REUTERS/Revolution Studios/Columbia Pictures/HO In the latest bid by our nostalgic society to plunge backwards in time, its rumoured that the Noughties phenomenon “Bennifer” (aka celebrity couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) is back on. The best way to celebrate this heartening news? Revisit the epically disastrous romcom where the pair first met. Let’s start with how to pronounce it. Gigli. Surely not “Giggly”? No. “Jeely”. Re...

Citizen Kane is overrated – but this Orson Welles classic isn’t Orson Welles’s masterpiece was The Magnificent Ambersons, a thoughtful epic about American wealth and the motor car. But there’s a snag… Anne Baxter arm in arm with Tim Holt in a scene from The Magnificent Ambersons Credit: Bettmann I avoid lists of the 100 greatest books, plays, paintings or films because they are inevitably meaningless. People have short memories and so rank the more recent above the antique. If strict ...

He had a certain elegance: Hannibal Lecter was inspired by a real killer  In 1963, while on assignment to Topo Chico Penitentiary in Nuevo León, Mexico to interview a murderer, a 23-year-old journalist called Thomas Harris got chatting to the prison doctor. He intended to ask him about saving the life of the killer, a Texan named Dykes Askew Simmons, after he was shot in a botched escape attempt, but instead he found that it was the doctor who did most of the questioning. “Mr. Harris, how d...

A hand-grenade of a film: Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Andersons If.... Credit: Alamy British director Lindsay Anderson wanted to shoot If…. at his own alma mater, Cheltenham College. “I liked my school,” he later wrote, despite what the 1968 film might suggest. “It was a pleasant, friendly place.” To secure permission from Cheltenham, Anderson submitted to the headmaster what his lifelong friend Gavin Lambert described as “a laundered script”. “They sleight of handed him [with]...

An ordinary bloke: Leonard Rossiter as Reginald Perrin Credit: BBC “Mother rang – she wants to know if we’re going to see her on Sunday.” Cue the image of a hippopotamus trotting through the mud. The best-remembered gag from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is – almost 45 years since it first aired – still very funny. Sure, that hippo trots right into the category of standard Seventies mother-in-law material, but there’s really nothing standard about The Fall and Rise of Regin...

The ‘unfathomable’ scandal behind Netflix’s Murder Among the Mormons Car bombings, necromancy and fraud – a new true crime series sheds new light on a case that almost blew up the secretive religion Hofmann pictured after his arrest in 1985 Credit: third hour  “Welcome to Salt Lake City,” runs an old airline pilot joke. “Remember to set your watches back 10 years.”  It’s a tired gag. But it neatly captures the air of fusty eccentricity that most people – if they think abou...