Movies Made Here: Recapping the Reviews of 2011

Spanning the decades, our Movies Made Here column has gone from Elizabeth Taylor's Oscar-winning role in BUtterfield 8 to Keanu Reeves definitely not winning an Oscar in Henry's Crime.

All we are missing is a representative from that gloriously tacky decade known as the '80s. We'll find something as we continue to feature films every other week in 2012...until we are out of films, and they shoot some more.

In the meantime, here's the round-up of the hits, misses and just endearingly wierd flicks we reviewed in 2011:

1. BUtterfield 8 (1960) - Look for just a few minutes of our dear old Tappan Zee when it was shiny and new, yet still leads to a horrible car crash. 

2. The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) - Made entirely in Tarrytown, "the film took all of two weeks to film, on a skimpy stripper-outfit budget of $125K. Beyond the façade of some mansion, a car speeding through country roads, and a walk down a TTown-esque looking lane of houses, the rest comes from some 'sound stage in a hotel basement.'"

3. House of Dark Shadows (1970) - The review that generated the most excitement, as this cult classic has the most rabid fans. Lyndhurst was the main setting of this feature length made from the gothic soap opera, along with some time in a crypt in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and, possibly, the now ruined Spratt House.

4. Savages (1972) - The weirdest one by far, this wild romp is all filmed in, and around, the former Beechwood Estate in Scarborough. Ivory said, "sophomoric nonsense" and "it just rubbed people the wrong way." Merchant said, "I think if the film were to play now there’d be a cult following." What do you think? Cult or flop?

5. Child's Play (1972) - "Marymount gets to experience gender reversal as a Catholic school for boys. Creepy boys. Lots of odd looking creepy boys who don’t speak much and seem to swarm innocents like buzzards" in this mystery gone amuck.

6. The Impostors (1998) - This farce is adrift! But before it launches off entirely into chaos on a cruiseliner, it enjoys some time here at the Tarrytown Music Hall. 

7. The Family Man (2000) - This remake of It's a Wonderful Life turned the building that used to occupy the site where Open Door is slated to be into a tire store with the world's most obtrusive sign (which would never fly with our zoning board.) Sadly they called this New Jersey.

8. Game 6 (2005) - "Several short scenes were filmed in the Music Hall (starting at around 30 minutes in, then the one-hour mark), standing in for a NYC theater whose shiny midtown exterior belies the shabby grandeur of the red-seated theater we know and love. The main character of the play-within-the-movie, Peter Redmond played by Harris Yulin, has a parasite in his brain and keeps getting jammed in rehearsals on the simplest line of all, 'This could be it.'" If you watch one movie filmed here that might really be good, this could be it.

9. The Good Shepherd (2006) - So Matt Damon doesn't feel the love for movie wife Angelina Jolie, okay. This film takes us again to the Music Hall, and the Set Back Inn, where Damon revisits his one true love before his life went all Cold War. 

10. Henry's Crime (2010) - Another numb hero who visits Tarrytown's hot spots of the Music Hall, the Set Back, Sol Mar, and Citi Bank, all here standing in for really cold Buffalo. 

*Honorable Mention

Sleepy Hollow (1999) - Tim Burton wanted to film it here in Sleepy Hollow and he was in talks with Philipsburg Manor but it wasn't dark and strange enough for his taste so he built his own darn village, in England. Oh well, we tried.