Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

    The ‘60s were a great time to be an older actress — at least if you were an older actress amenable to having your image roughed up a bit by appearing in a horror film in a “psycho-biddy” role popularized by 1962’s WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?….

  Somewhere on a colorful and computer-generated plane of existence, a semblance of “life” trudges along, oddly familiar in both tone and content to the world we know: the denizens navigate their way through a media-saturated landscape, waste too much time on the internet, immerse themselves in various fan “communities,”…

I’m not about to get on a soapbox and claim that 1982’s SUPERSTITION (a.k.a THE WITCH) is a good film. It is sloppily plotted with an unnecessarily complicated backstory set three hundred years in the past and a subplot that eventually just fizzles out. But I am going to claim that it is…

The Chattanooga Film Festival is one of the best festivals in the United States for new genre films and retro screenings of classic exploitation and genre fare. In its sixth year, the festival is being held April 11-14, 2019.   Day four was a straight dive into movies right from…

    Following the massively successful theatrical release of Gerard Damiano’s DEEP THROAT in 1972, the major American studios found themselves on the outside of a major cultural event — and more importantly, the money they could be making by capitalizing on it. Twentieth Century Fox had tried to get…

    TO THE NIGHT is a deeply, unpleasantly frustrating film.   It sometimes feels as though that maybe director Peter Brunner maybe views that as a feature and not a bug, and if so, then he’s succeeded wildly, creating a film that almost dares you to not keep it…

      If you thought the cinematic descriptor “Tarantino-esque” was no longer an applicable one — that the fad to piggyback on the director’s signature curlicue dark-comedy style was long gone — than go to Russia. Because Kirill Sokolov’s  WHY DON’T YOU JUST DIE feels like a big, gaudy throwback…

  The Windy City Horrorama 2019  film festival line up is boiling over with some of the most insane genre films to grace the screen. It’s going to be an intense weekend of of cinematic insanity.   Closing out the fest is FP2:BEATS OF RAGE, the sequel to the mind-blowing…

    Video Violence is a weekly column digging deep into the lesser-known genre films recently released to home video. This week’s column takes a look at sleazy psycho-thriller THE LAST VICTIM, now on Blu-ray from Dark Force Entertainment. The movie: Before its credits even begin to unfold, THE LAST…

    It’s a bit surreal watching a band that’s existed since you were two years old reach what could be, allegedly, the end of their lifespan, especially when they haven’t released any new full length material (solo projects of varying quality aside) in around ten years. On the other…

    There’s a scene about halfway through HELLBOY, Neil Marshall’s ersatz “let’s-keep-the-property-rights-going” version of Guillermo Del Toro’s version of Mike Mignola’s Satan-spawn comic book superhero, that is good enough to make you realize how much you hate the rest of it. It involves Hellboy, played by David Harbour under mounds…

The Chattanooga Film Festival is one of the best festivals in the United States for new genre films and retro screenings of classic exploitation and genre fare. In its sixth year, the festival is being held April 11-14, 2019.   Day three started off with a live recording of the…

The Chattanooga Film Festival is one of the best festivals in the United States for new genre films and retro screenings of classic exploitation and genre fare. In its sixth year, the festival is being held April 11-14, 2019.   Day two! Let’s just jump right into it.   FREAKS…

The Chattanooga Film Festival is one of the best festivals in the United States for new genre films and retro screenings of classic exploitation and genre fare. In its sixth year, the festival is being held April 11-14, 2019.   After two nights of not much sleep, I made the…

    This is the second year of the Windy City Horrorama film festival, and it will be my first year going to all three days. Last year I was only able to go for one day, but that day was filled with fun, fresh, independent cinema. None of the…

      Punxploitation is a niche sub-genre of cinema that isn’t meant to be understood by those outside of the punk rock spectrum. These films are for punk rockers, rudeboys, hardcore kids, and skinheads. The fact that these films are intended for such a small group of dedicated fans…

       I’m not sure what it is about “Bible comics,” but there’s something appealing about the whole notion, even to a devout non-believer such as myself. Whether it’s the fire and brimstone of a Jack T. Chick or the scaled-down intimacy of a Chester Brown, I’m down for…

On the commentary track for BLOOD LAKE, director Tim Boggs points out just one of several shots that last for a beat or two too long, resulting in awkward pacing and seemingly random editorial choices. The source of these bizarre moments, he reveals, was to get the film to a feature-length…

        Flight attendants weren’t always addressed as such. In the less enlightened 1960s and ’70s, “stewardesses” not only attended to every in-flight needs of airline travelers, they had to meet strict levels of boredom-normative “attractiveness” to do it.   In addition, marketers played up that calculated, humiliatingly…

  I’ve always been a huge supporter of micro-budget indie horror. These types of films take a lot of heart to turn from a kernel of an idea to actually being made. FRANKENTHUG has more heart than it can handle, and you can tell that everyone involved was dedicated to…

Released August 28th, 1992 Paramount’s PET SEMATARY TWO sought to capitalize on the moderate success of it’s 1989 predecessor.  Returning director Mary Lambert originally sought to continue the story of the Creed family by focusing the sequel on the Ellie Creed, now in her teenage years. The studio wasn’t convinced…

For the third straight year, Cinepocalypse will invade the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. This year, the genre film festival is bringing along the unusual—yet very cool—pairing of director Joel Schumacher and horror-metal legends GWAR to melt minds.     While the full lineup of films and events will be…

    When you make a genre movie based upon real-life horrific events, there’s a certain responsibility of the filmmakers to treat the subject matter with care. There are multiple ways to do this. You can film in black and white to desaturate the gore: Villeneuve brought earnest seriousness to…

It’s here! The full list of films that will be showing at the second annual Windy City Horrorama Film Festival! There’s a lot to take in, so just sit down and savor it all! There’s a repertory screening of IDLE HANDS with director Rodman Flender in attendance and the midwest…