Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

  Emmy Award Winner Mac Quayle has led an insanely diverse career as a composer, assisting on films ranging from DRIVE, THE LINCOLN LAWYER, ONLY GOD FORGIVES, and CONTAGION. The shared filmmakers behind those works prove that Quayle is a person who is both well-liked and puts out work that…

Daily Grindhouse covers all sorts of genre fare—from vintage sexploitation films to the most recent splatterfest hitting streaming. But it probably seems like a review of A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD—the Mr. Rogers film starring America’s nicest uncle, Tom Hanks—wouldn’t really fit in with this website. But Marielle Heller’s new movie about PBS’ ultimate mensch fits in on this site for two main reasons.

Freddy is definitely one of those characters that has entered a rare plane as a character that’s inexorably tied to its performer. You simply can’t imagine anyone but Englund playing Krueger, and WB’s ill-advised reboot attempt reinforced as much. Not that we needed it to, of course: I don’t think it’s blasphemous to say that Englund is Freddy at this point, and it’s going to take a helluva performance by someone to prove otherwise. Part of that is obviously just familiarity—at this point, he’s been associated with the role for over 30 years, and I suppose that creates a sort of unconscious bias. But still, I also think Englund genuinely shaped this character and etched Freddy into the public consciousness unlike his fellow horror icons.

2019 could be a comeback year for one of the most uneven trends in cinema history: movies based on songs. Paul Feig’s LAST CHRISTMAS was inspired by the WHAM! song that’s become a holiday staple. Meanwhile on Netflix, there’s Heartstrings, an anthology series debuting on November 22 where each entry is based on a different Dolly Parton song. “It’s like Creepshow, but with ‘Jolene!’”

In honor of this unusual return to form, we’re rounded up some of the highs and lows of song-to-film adaptations. (You can decide which is which.)

Brett, you asked if I was a bigger fan of 1984’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET’s fantasy sequences being on the more “realistic” dream-like wavelength of PHANTASM or what the ELM STREET sequels did with the more elaborate nightmare scenarios. It’s the former, actually. Something the 1984 film does that the others don’t is relegate the actual visuals of the nightmares to our heroines alone.

So here’s the thing — I’ve reviewed this comic on this site already. But I haven’t reviewed this comic on this site already. I realize that demands an explanation, so by way of such: Casanova Frankenstein self-published a “rough cut” of the book that would later become Tad Martin #7…

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and its sequels, plays like a greatest hits of horror, with all of its iconic bad dream imagery burned into my brain, but mostly out of context, like clips tethered to a music video…I share your experience, Brett, that initial exposure seemed like you had just watched something that felt different. It was like every other horror franchise was a leveled off painting, and then there was ELM STREET hanging there on a wall, crooked as a politician – a painting in a world without levels.

There is a crackerjack short film buried somewhere inside of SCARY MOVIE. But, as is often the case with work from first time feature directors, that short film is stretched beyond the breaking point to create a repetitive experience that has several admirable components, but leaves the audience begging for…

Now, upon its 35th anniversary, Nathan Smith and Brett Gallman look back at the innovative genius of the movie that transformed New Line Cinema from an indie movie studio (putting out ALONE IN THE DARK and POLYESTER) to the House That Freddy Built and then on to a prestige motion picture studio that released Academy Award winners like THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. Pick up your hall pass, because it’s time for a deep discussion of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.

I honestly knew very little about Sarah Jacobson or her work when I dug into this collection from AGFA. What I found was a filmmaker with a clear voice, very strong sense of place and character, and a more than welcome female perspective that was often sorely lacking in American…

“Every generation Blames the one before And all of their frustrations Come beating on your door I know that I’m a prisoner To all my Father held so dear I know that I’m a hostage To all his hopes and fears I just wish I could have told him in…

    Where I come from, drugs were always considered to be pretty fun — and, for the record, I feel that if consumed responsibly they are — but who are we kidding? Kicking them can be a real motherfucker, and it’s not like the path of recovery isn’t perilous in its own…

For many people of a certain age, there’s a certain school-set television show that corresponds with their age range. There were the adults who viewed The Wonder Years as a nostalgia-tinted look back at trodding the halls of academia while the Vietnam War raged in a country far away. Folks who grew up in the ’80s looked to Freaks And Geeks for their teenaged feels. Canadian kids (and Kevin Smith) had Degrassi Junior High and people slightly older than me identified with the short-lived My So-Called Life. I watched all of these shows and sympathized with all of these people since they too were struggling through their awkward phases of pre-pubescent youth, but the one that really resonated with me—since I was younger and in the same grade as its cast of characters—was Boy Meets World. Today I’m talking about an episode that I loved when it aired and, honestly, still love to this day; an episode that many fans consider to be the best episode of the series—“And Then There Was Shawn,” episode 17 of season five (original airdate, February 27th, 1998).

      What happened to Carolyn Harper? Part suburban nightmare, part neon-soaked teenage fever dream, this tantalizing mystery traces the wave of fear and distrust that spreads across a small Midwestern town in the wake of a high school girl’s mysterious disappearance. As the loneliness and darkness lurking beneath…

Do you think fictional slasher movie villains are capable of finding inner peace? For most of them, their violent bloodbaths were predicated on enacting revenge for the wrongs they felt were thrust upon them, like Mrs. Voorhees losing her son or Kenny Hampson being goaded into making out with a dead body. They usually end up dead before the credits roll, unable to bring their journey of slaying to its natural endpoint – that they can never end what drove them to madness in the first place. Others just continue on in cash-grab sequel after sequel, their acts of terror driven by an unending hunger for carnage so much so that they most likely don’t even remember the motivations for why they picked up their butchering implements in the first place. Getting resurrected time after time, it seems like they’ll never find tranquility, it seems like they’ll be trapped in hell forever.

  Imagine an animated xeroxed collage of German Expressionism, Dadaism, Maya Deren, and Japanese masked horror theater taking place in an insane asylum. Now make it weird.     Not to sound like a hack, but I can’t really think of a movie more perfectly-titled than A PAGE OF MADNESS….

  Wes Craven passed away in 2015, leaving a massive heartache in the horror community, one that still lasts to today (giving us a tragic trifecta of loss with both Tobe Hooper and George Romero no longer with us). What Craven left behind is a wild, insane filmography of iconic…

    Over the course of the past few years, I’ve been of a mind that Simon Hanselmann should dump Megg, Mogg, Owl, and the rest of the gang and do something different. Move forward. Push himself to expand his horizons by letting go of the familiar. On a purely…

Legacy looms large over DOCTOR SLEEP and finds itself as a recurring theme in many of the characters and arcs told in its two and a half hour running time. The legacy of an alcoholic father, passing along his rage and addiction to a son that barely knew him. The legacy of a supernatural race, clawing its way for survival as it buys more time with the blood and screams of children. The legacy of a traumatic event and the shuttered, haunted grounds on which it took place.

    There are gangster movies and then there are ultimate gangster movies. SCARFACE is one of the latter. Long held in esteem by critics, film fans and, somewhat oddly, hip-hop artists, who admire a story about an immigrant coming to America with nothing in his pockets and building an…

    THE KILLER OF DOLLS is probably the quirkiest and most bizarre catalog release I’ve seen in years. Though a Spanish production and directed by Miguel Madrid (under alias Michael Skaife), it shares a lot in common with the Italian giallo, right down to the era in which it…

I’ve seen more absurd, outrageous movies than FEAR NO EVIL, but few of them have made me mutter an amused “What the hell?” to myself as many times as I did while watching this odd little flick. For whatever reason that I cannot quite put my finger on, there is something…

And so…the end is here. Rocktoberfest 2019, Daily Grindhouse’s month-long celebration of horror and music, came to end today. Yes, it’s technically November now—but it’s also All Saints’ Day and Día de Muertos, which are still festive, a bit spooky, and certainly have their own musical traditions. However, like every concert ever, we prolonged the applause far too long and came back for an encore to play the hits ONE! MORE! TIME! and also thank folks and find excuses to use GIFs that make us giggle way too much.

There have been multiple musicals based on horror movies such as (deep breath):

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, CARRIE, THE EVIL DEAD, RE-ANIMATOR, BEETLEJUICE, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, NOSFERATU, DRACULA, AMERICAN PSYCHO, GHOST, TEEN WITCH, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, JEKYLL & HYDE, THE TOXIC AVENGER, and more.

But today’s Big Question is about the future. What splatter-centric spine tingler would you like to see hit the boards of Broadway?