By JOHN BEIFUSS, Scripps Howard News Service

In film after film in the 1930s, from "Frankenstein" to "The Mummy" to "The Ghoul" and on and on, actor Boris Karloff functioned as a sort of wanderer -- an explorer -- in the shadow land between life and death.

If the movies he inhabited sometimes were considered juvenile, the subject matter that motivated them couldn't have been more adult, more profound.

As Art Linkletter never said, kids say the darnedest things about body parts.

"There was a brown fake arm and a lot of tan fake arms," commented 6-year-old stoic Julia Comes, unfazed after her recent discovery of a table of bloody severed limbs in her upscale Memphis, Tenn., neighborhood, where the cast and crew of the MTV horror production "Savage County" was in residency this week.

Hundreds of movies currently are making the rounds of domestic and international film festivals, but it's safe to say only one of them showcases Faye Dunaway in the role of a one-armed police detective from Memphis battling an Elvis-loving rockabilly zombie in Wales.

A tart romantic comedy set in California wine country, "Sideways" earned Virginia Madsen a Best Actress Oscar nomination and reinforced her status as a mature thinking person's sex symbol -- a vintage that improves with age.

Los Angeles had Vampira, New York had Zacherley, Chicago had Svengoolie, Cleveland had Ghoulardi and New Orleans had Morgus.

It's easy to see why the Walt Disney production "Escape to Witch Mountain" made an impression on the young children who encountered it in movie theaters in 1975.

Paul Newman hated his debut motion picture, "The Silver Chalice," a 1954 biblical epic that is one of five new-to-DVD titles, available separately, in Warner Home Video's recently issued "Paul Newman Film Series."

Five years ago, Kate Coyne Conn, a Northwest Airlines flight attendant from Memphis, Tenn., was touched when she saw a Marine saluting a coffin containing the remains of a serviceman killed in the Iraq War, as the coffin was loaded into the cargo hold of her passenger plane in Philadelphia.

Leigh Anne Tuohy says it was "extremely flattering" to learn that Sandra Bullock had been cast to portray her in a movie.
But could Tuohy reverse the situation and step into a movie star's shoes?

Tonya S. Holly -- Elvis relative and filmmaker -- is upset that reporters have been treating her planned production of "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde" as if the movie itself were a crime, like bank robbery.