Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

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.

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.

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…

I honestly wish I loved THE DEVIL RIDES OUT as much as the contributors to the special features of this new Scream Factory Blu-ray do. But while I am very impressed by a couple of the film’s more ambitious set-pieces and Christopher Lee’s imposing presence put to good use as…

There are few pleasures as pure as hearing Eddie Murphy exclaim “motherfucker,” and DOLEMITE IS MY NAME delivers just that in the opening seconds of the film—and countless times after that. DOLEMITE IS MY NAME could indeed be the film that brings Murphy back to an older audience that may…

    Joe Begos is a pastiche artist. I mean that in the best way possible. His films drip with love for the ‘80s video exploitation he grew up on, which he repurposes into authentic recreations he’s seemingly transported directly from the musty aisles of mom-and-pop stores which he grew…

    Rian Johnson loves a good mystery. And why not? There’s a tingly jolt of pleasure from watching a good one. There’s just something about watching an ingeniously clever genius sleuth unravel a knotty tangle of murderous deception, and there’s a certain  frisspon of satisfaction when we watch our…

    There are no actual killer sofas in KILLER SOFA; it’s actually a garden variety recliner that does all the killing. Sorry for those of you expecting a murderous loveseat to go on the rampage, slaughtering people in multi-cushioned fashion – it’s only a single seat that you get…

  Anthologies have become all the rage in independent horror in the past few years, and why wouldn’t they? No film is easy to get mounted, but there’s something appealing about the “variety is the spice of life” method of storytelling for omnibus films, the way it can showcase the…

  Last year, a film came out that didn’t exactly reinvent the wheel in terms of what a devil possession film was, but did enough things right that it earned the filmmakers a bit of faith. It was called ALONG CAME THE DEVIL, and it featured Bruce Davison as an…

The first volume in Scream Factory’s Universal Horror Collection, made up of four collaborations between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, was a hard act to follow. While a drop off in the quality of films was to be expected, I did not anticipate such a precipitous decline with Volume Two….

  The second outing of any artist — particularly one coming off a near-universally praised debut—is always an interesting project to behold. For many, whether it’s a novelist, painter, filmmaker, playwright, comics artist, or anything else, it’s a time of great pressure and also great opportunity. Some choose to swing…

The best way to see either WHO KILLED CAPTAIN ALEX? or BAD BLACK is with a crowd (preferably inebriated) at a midnight screening of a genre film festival like Fantastic Fest. Unfortunately, I missed out on seeing the films with a crowd, but watching these nuggets of thoroughly insane genre…

As the opening credits for ITSY BITSY roll we see imagery of a dark, sorcerous ritual intercut with extreme close-ups of a spider. The ritual is obviously tied to the arachnid, as it all looks pretty “spidery.” Soon after, those participating in the ritual lie dead and a jeep full…

    I came out as bi back in May, when my hometown celebrated its own Pride day a month before official national celebrations. It was just a few months before my 36th birthday, which means it took several decades plus for me to grapple with my own sexuality, my…

    2019 marks the fifteenth anniversary of Fantastic Fest, and they’re celebrating in fine style with a massive slate of features, a fun and fascinating sidebar of Mexican genre cinema, and more events than any one person could physically attend over the course of a week. Daily Grindhouse will…

  Movies like GUNS AKIMBO have a fine line to walk between entertaining and irritating. Flashy, colorful and in-your-face, they either act as breathless, pulsating fun — or just pain exhausting. Misjudge the bravado, and the whole thing can feel like you’re being screamed at by a paranoid, spittle-flying gamer…

  Stephen King has always had a knack for tapping into the most basic of universal fears. From clowns to disease to, err, demonically possessed industrial laundry presses, King has built his reputation on finding the para in the normal. With IN THE TALL GRASS, the 2012 novella he wrote…

For me, most of the joy when it comes to specialty home video companies putting out older films is when they start to dig into the lesser-known output of major figures. With the Universal Horror Collection: Volume One, Scream Factory has brought surprisingly great looking restorations to four collaborations between Boris Karloff and…

  THE BANANA SPLITS MOVIE is the kind of WTF, bizarro-world horror goof that feels made for pre-fab cult status. It has a premise jerry-rigged for the look-how-wacky-we-are outrageousness of modern manufactured cult schlock: let’s take the titular TV series, a sort of proto-Teletubbies afternoon-babysitter Hanna-Barbera singalong that originally ran…

      JOJO RABBIT is the kind of movie where I can see why someone would love it, even if I didn’t. It’s sweet and sentimental and just challenging enough to make one feel they are getting a full meal, instead of a sugary and empty calorie amuse-bouche. It’s…

    Starting in 1958 and continuing throughout the ’60s, England’s Hammer Studios–partnered with Warner Bros. in America — crafted a series of Gothic horror movies starring the old guard of monster royalty who had previously been the star characters of Universal’s scarepics in the ’30s and ’40s. Dracula and…

The Andy Muschietti-led adaptation of Stephen King’s It, first released in 2017 and now concluded with IT CHAPTER TWO, is a very high profile project that already achieved much—even before the final entry hits theaters. 2017’s IT is the highest grossing horror movie of all time. Combined with Stranger Things,…

  It’s an odd discussion, to be sure, but a regularly recurring one about what was the “best” year (so far) for film. 1982 is always a contender, and it’s not hard to see why — there are a bunch of classics and cult classics released that year that would…