Director John Frankenheimer in top form with ‘Black Sunday’

BLACK SUNDAY (1977)

By TERRY R. CASSREINO

Long before author Thomas Harris introduced Hannibal Lecter into the film and literary world, he wrote a crackling suspense thriller about a terrorist plot to bomb the Super Bowl in New Orleans.

“Black Sunday” was a page-turner unlike any other. I devoured the book quickly in the fall of 1975 during my one-hour commute after school aboard a series of New Orleans public busses.

So, when veteran film maker John Frankenheimer jumped on board to direct the movie version, I knew it had to be good.

Frankenheimer helmed such important political thrillers as “The Machurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May.” Frankenheimer even directed the underrated sequel to “The French Connection” in which Gene Hackman reprised his role of Popeye Doyle.

Frankenheimer, to me, seemed a great choice for “Black Sunday.” I was right.

Bad movies I love: Joe Dante’s hilarious ‘Jaws’ rip-off ‘Piranha’

PIRANHA (1978)

By TERRY R. CASSREINO

I loved drive-in theaters and the cheap, trashy films that often played there – usually melodramatic revenge dramas, car-chase thrillers and rip-offs of high-profile, big-budget movies from major studios.

By the mid- to late 1970s, the spate of “Exorcist” clones significantly slowed. In its place came a series of “Jaws” rip-offs that saw fair to middling success from people hungry for the same thrills and scares they experienced when they saw the 1975 Steven Spielberg classic.

“Grizzly” led the way in 1976 with its story of an 18-foot rampaging grizzly bear. The next year saw “Tentacles,” about a killer octopus, and “Tintorera,” about a killer tiger shark. Then, in June 1978, the sub-par sequel “Jaws 2” hit screens.

My favorite is a small film that opened in drive-ins and second-run  houses in August 1978. Joe Dante’s “Piranha” belongs to the class of films that are so pathetically bad, so poorly acted, so horribly directed that they instantly become a classic unequaled in cinema history.

Sneak Prevue Mailbag: Waiting forever just to see a movie

By TERRY R. CASSREINO

I have stood in line literally hours just to buy a ticket to see a film high on my want-to-see-list – a list that through the years has included “Earthquake,” “The Towering Inferno,” “Jaws” and “Star Wars.”

I know “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” are embarrassing, guilty pleasures. But, hey, “Earthquake” played at the Joy Theater in downtown New Orleans in late 1974 accompanied by that wonderful, ear-piercing gimmick called Sensurround (“Feel it as well as see it in Sensurround”).

And I couldn’t wait to experience a real, live, 9.0-magnitude, end-of-the-world, Armageddon-is-coming earthquake in the comfort and safety of a climate-controlled movie theater. I wasn’t disappointed.

But “Jaws?” Now that’s a different story. In fact I’ll talk about my experiences with that film when I answer questions in this week’s edition of the Sneak Prevue Mailbag. As you no doubt already have discovered, the Sneak Prevue Mailbag feature moves to Fridays beginning this week.

Bad movies I love: Cheap, hilarious rip-offs of ‘The Exorcist’

ABBY (1974)

By TERRY R. CASSREINO

Shortly after the box-office success of “The Exorcist” in 1973, studios flooded screens with cheap, American and European knock-offs that played second-run theaters and the drive-in circuit.

From Italian films like “The Return of the Exorcist” and “House of Exorcism”  to Spain’s “Exorcismo” and Turkey’s hysterically funny “Seytan,” film makers cashed in on the hottest craze in cinema: Satanic possession.

Even backers of the original “Exorcist” produced a terrible sequel, “Exorcist 2: The Heretic.” That film was followed years later by the equally bad “The Exorcist 3” and two separate, completely different versions of what was, essentially, “The Exorcist 4.” Let’s hear it for another shining example of Hollywood originality. How could anyone dare to think he or she could duplicate the success of the greatest horror film of all time?

Now, here’s where the fun begins. Buried in this huge, overflowing pile of rotting, stinking garbage of “Exorcist” sequels and cheesy rip-offs are two small gems – movies that are wildly entertaining simply because they are so pathetically awful.