Tough Films For The Rough Crowd

In the early ’40s, RKO Pictures teamed producer Val Lewton with director Jacques Tourneur for three economical (read: low budget) horror movies. The studio gave them three titles, none of which particularly appealed to either filmmaker, but they dutifully soldiered on and gave the productions their all. They started with CAT…

The first time I saw LUZ was at Fantastic Fest 2018 and it was a very singular experience. On the one hand, I was completely engaged and enthralled by the film with its retro style, complicated audio design, and unfolding story of demonic possession. But, I had to fight to…

  Home invasion films are now a pretty common staple of the horror genre. Since the ’60s, there has been an almost cyclical nature of the popularity of these movies, with some stone cold classics popping up in each resurgence. STRAW DOGS, THE STRANGERS, ALONE IN THE DARK, ILS, FUNNY…

Cannibal cinema requires a taste for the tasteless, and Eli Roth’s THE GREEN INFERNO (2013) is no different. His take on the cannibal horror sub-genre is an exercise in nihilistic brutality intended only for the most hardcore fans. However, like most cannibal films, the story behind the making of this…

By the early ‘50s there had been a few movies where an alien from another world had come to Earth. There were also a handful of shows where an Earthling took the audience on a trip to another world–most notably Flash Gordon, who had taken viewers to Mongo and Mars…

Back around 2000, when I heard there was a new SHAFT movie coming out, I wasn’t all that surprised. It’s always been Hollywood’s habit to remake old movies, whether said remake is necessary or not. The original SHAFT came out in 1971; one of the first blaxploitation movies kicking off that genre across…

I first caught NIGHT OF THE CREEPS in the early to mid-’90s when it aired as part of a week of zombie films hosted by Rob Zombie on what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel. After showing acknowledged classics like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and THE EVIL DEAD, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS wrapped up the week…

Filmmaker Joe Begos knows what a certain breed of horror audience wants out of genre cinema and isn’t afraid to deliver it. He has an adoration for the genre—particularly horror from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—and is making the kind of films that—I imagine—he would have wanted to see…

Danzig is for the children…or at least the 16 year old boy in all of us. It feels a little disingenuous reviewing VEROTIKA. So far the film has only screened last night as part of this year’s Cinepocalypse Genre Film Festival at Chicago’s Music Box Theater. Danzig himself was on…

  The horror anthology film has a long and varied history, but generally, the genre can be summed up in one TV Guide-friendly sentence: Through a framing device, three to five short stories are presented, each with twisty or macabre endings. Until recently, few anthology films have bothered to make…

Despite the presence of the always reliable Peter Cushing as the titular mad scientist, FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN moves at a shockingly slow pace for a Hammer Film—especially one directed by Terence Fisher. It takes nearly an hour for the promised “creation” to occur, leaving not much time for the wrap-up of an…

The trailer for THE ENTITY concludes with a tagline claiming that it is “based on a true story…that is still happening.” That should be your first clue that no matter how good the film is for most of its runtime, the ending is destined to be underwhelming at best, unsatisfying at worst….

Fred Walton’s 1979 thriller WHEN A STRANGER CALLS exists in that great little slit of time in between HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th, when the slasher film became popularized but before it settled on a very specific structure. The film is best known for its opening reel, in which a series of threatening…

The new crop of films coming from the Fangoria magazine—the reborn horror rag that flourished in the ‘80s—share a certain aesthetic. The films are overlit and at times look remarkably cheap, which is surprising particularly coming from an outfit that takes the genre so damn seriously. There’s also lots of…

Ah, we get to dip our toes in that beautiful pool called the ‘70s disaster movie. When producer Ross Hunter and director George Seaton brought us a very eventful evening in a major metropolitan AIRPORT in 1970, they had no idea they were starting a new genre in film–one that led to very successful flicks about capsized…

Before they became the purview of the Lifetime Movie Network, there was a subgenre of theatrically released thrillers and horror movies where a woman is stalked for the duration of the film by a loon–usually a hulking character actor known for their villainous portraits, but sometimes a young leading man…

It’s interesting to be on the outside of a fandom and peer in without much frame of reference. Pokémon blew up right around middle school for me, so it was already on the cusp of young adult and not exactly my demographic. Though lord knows that didn’t stop me from…

Tribeca Film Festival was a twelve day extravaganza of 103 features, talks with filmmakers, and gala events. I made the pilgrimage this year to catch a few independent film premieres, take in the latest VR experiences, and eat enough slices at Joe’s Pizza to make John Candy blush.   Here…

Scream Factory goes for the creepy crawly in their Blu-ray release of the 1955 Universal-International big bug movie TARANTULA.     We get off to an atmospheric start with an unidentified man in the desert dropping dead. He’s not exactly a brown eyed handsome man either. Small town doctor Matt…

THE VELOCIPASTOR is not a bad movie. It’s not even an “it’s so bad it’s good” movie. Is it cheaply made? Yes. Is it amateurish and unpolished? Sure. But is it entertaining enough to warrant spending an hour and fifteen minutes? Will it inspire more than a handful of teenage…

I TRAPPED THE DEVIL is a slightly misleading title. One of the characters in the film does indeed trap someone (or something) that he believes to be a physical manifestation of evil, but the pulpy fun of a horror-comedy implied by that title is not present. In its place is a…

    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?….

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…

    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…