Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category
Tuesday, November 9th, 2021
COLD HELL (Die Hölle) is a 2017 German/Austrian movie that’s still exclusive to Shudder in the U.S. I wish they’d put it out on disc like they have with so many of their exclusives, because this is a good one that I’d like to recommend to everybody. As far as I can find the only part of the world to release it on physical media is Germany.
Wanting to see this movie is what originally inspired me to subscribe to Shudder a few years ago, but for some reason I failed to write it up back then. I watched it again in October and it holds up, so I made sure to share it with everyone this time.
Its greatest asset is a strong lead character, Özge, played by Violetta Schurawlow (HEAD FULL OF HONEY, ICEMAN). She’s Turkish, but a citizen of Austria, working as a cab driver. And the movie slowly unveils how tough she is. At first it just seems like the grit required by her occupation, considering how some motherfuckers treat cab drivers, and immigrants, and women. Then it seems to go a step or two beyond that when she needs two guys to stop blocking an alley and beats one up for calling her the c-word. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Austria, Muay Thai, Muslim, Sammy Sheik, serial killer, Shudder, Stefan Ruzowitsky, Tobias Moretti, Violetta Schurawlow
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Thriller | 17 Comments »
Thursday, November 4th, 2021
THE SLEEPING CAR (1990) is not exactly a slasher movie, but because it says “Forget Freddy. Forget Jason. Here Comes The Mister!” on the cover it officially qualifies for Slasher Search. Congratulations, THE SLEEPING CAR!
When I saw that title I thought, “huh?” but then I saw the train on the cover and I thought oh, I get it, not a passed out automobile, but the place on a train where you sleep. Okay. I’ll go with it. Actually, this looks kinda good.
But it does not open promisingly. Some guy is making out with some woman in a train car. She strips down to her historical panties and giant boobs and they giggle and make out while the score by Ray Colcord (My Two Dads, AMITYVILLE DOLLHOUSE) erupts into erotic saxophone. The engineer (John Carl Buechler, director of FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE NEW BLOOD) comes in and yells at the guy to stop fornicating and do his job. He chooses instead to continue with the fornicating, and then the engineer jumps off the train right before it crashes head on with another train and then he yells into the sky like newly minted Darth Vader when he finds out Padme is dead. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Naughton, Douglas Curtis, Ernestine Mercer, Gary Brockette, Greg Collins O'Neill, Jeff Conaway, John Carl Buechler, Judie Aronson, Kevin McCarthy, Nicole Hansen, Ray Colcord, Slasher Search, VHS
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021
In a small, depressing town in Oregon, ravaged by economic despair and opioid addiction, out crawls a monster to make shit even worse. Come on, read the room, monster. We don’t see him clearly for a while, we don’t know what he’s up to at first, or how he works, but we get his general vibe. Uncool.
We see this story primarily through the eyes of elementary school teacher Julia Meadows (Keri Russell, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III, DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, and I believe I heard she was in a ‘90s television show created by the directors of those films, not sure about that, probly mistaken), who is not in a great spot. She moved out of town when she was young, but has recently returned to find it not as good as it even was then. She temporarily lives in her childhood home with her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons, BATTLESHIP) and every day goes to the store and stares longingly at the liquor shelf while she buys a pack of gum or something.
She has trouble getting all but one of her students to engage at all in class, but she tries. For example she calls on Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas, “School boy / classmate,” DOLLY PARTON’S COAT OF MANY COLORS), a scrawny sad little kid with holes in his shirt, who may possibly be illiterate. He goes from drawings with no text when he reads his story, an extremely grim and thinly-veiled autobiography about a young bear and his sick father bear. We can see how it sounds to her, but we know it’s even worse: his dad Frank (Scott Haze, VENOM, MINARI) and little brother Aiden (Sawyer Jones, one episode of Modern Family) had an encounter with the monster and now they’re locked in the attic as veiny, bestial zombie-type creatures. Lucas kills small animals and chops up roadkill to feed them. Alot of responsibility for a kid that age, and he definitely steps up to the plate. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amy Madigan, Graham Greene, Guillermo Del Toro, Guy Davis, Jeremy T. Thomas, Jesse Plemons, Keri Russell, monster movies, Nick Antosca, Rory Cochrane, Sawyer Jones, Scott Cooper, Scott Haze
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Friday, October 29th, 2021
Do you like scary movies? What about SCARY MOVIE? I’m not talking about the original script title for SCREAM, or the parody movie series named after the original script title for SCREAM, but the 1991 movie starring John Hawkes and taking place on Halloween night. It was shot on 16mm in Austin and when the American Genre Film Archive released a restored blu-ray and DVD in 2019 they said it had never been “legitimately distributed” until then. I did find a reference to it playing “limited runs in Europe and Asia,” but anyway, that’s why most of us never heard of it before.
Hawkes is from Minnesota, but as a young man he moved to Austin, where he was in a couple bands (including one with Rodney “Joey from ELM STREET 3 & 4” Eastman) and started appearing in locally filmed movies like FUTURE-KILL (the one with the unrelated H.R. Giger cover), D.O.A., and a thriller called MURDER RAP where he’s the star. He’s also the lead in SCARY MOVIE, playing a fraidy cat nerd named Warren who goes with his more outgoing buddy Brad (Jason R. Waller, Austin Stories) and Brad’s girlfriend Shelley (THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE) to a haunted house attraction. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: AGFA, Bruce Glover, Butch Patrick, Butthole Surfers, Cristi Harris, Dan Mazur, Dirk Blocker, Duane Whitaker, Elizabeth Barondes, Gary Lockwood, Halloween, Howard Swain, Jeff Burr, John Hawkes, John Lazar, John Mese, killer scarecrow, Reed Steiner, Robert Jacks, Stephen Root
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 28th, 2021
I figured I should see another Halloween-set film this season, and I knew this one was from director Patrick Lussier (DRACULA 2000) and writer Todd Farmer (JASON X), the team that brought us MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D and DRIVE ANGRY 3D, so I’d been wanting to see it even though it was filmed in a pathetic 2 (two) dimensions.
TRICK is a mystery slasher set not just on Halloween, but on multiple Halloweens from 2015-2019. It begins at a high school party during a game of spin the bottle. Well, spin the knife. The camera focuses on the reactions of Cheryl (Kristina Reyes, Blindspot), who seems uncomfortable with a guy in a pumpkin mask (Thom Niemann, The Deuce) who is not speaking or responding to anyone. When it’s his turn she calls him “Trick,” which does turn out to be his name. He spins and it ends up on a boy and he tries to re-spin but they tease him and tell him he has to kiss the boy. As he leans in to do it, suddenly he grabs the knife and stabs the guy.
(Though this inciting incident implies some sort of homophobia-related motive, that does not turn out to be a theme of the film.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Dalla Villa, Dani Shay, Ellen Adair, Jamie Kennedy, Kristina Reyes, Michael Wandmacher, Omar Epps, Patrick Lussier, slashers, Thom Niemann, Todd Farmer, Vanessa Aspillaga, whodunit slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, October 27th, 2021
MACABRE (RUMAH DARA) is a 2009 Indonesian cannibal movie. It’s the first feature directed by “The Mo Brothers,” a.k.a. Kimo Stamboel (THE QUEEN OF BLACK MAGIC) and Timo Tjahjanto (THE NIGHT COMES FOR US). It starts out confident and unassuming and by the end has accumulated a DIE HARD level of injury and a nearly EVIL DEAD amount of blood.
In the grand horror tradition, a group of young people get stranded somewhere bad and have to escape. It goes down when Adjie (Ario Bayu, GUNDALA) and his pregnant wife Astrid (Sigi Wimala, SATRIA DEWA: GATOTKACA) take a road trip with their doofus friends. Jimmy (Daniel Mananta, A MAN CALLED AHOK) is pretty straight-laced, but Eko (Dendy Subangil, SANG DEWI) is the horny loud mouth who embarrasses them and makes them uncomfortable, and Alam is kind of the crazy one. That’s established when he threatens some guys at a bar for sexually harassing their waitress, Adjie’s sister Ladya (Julie Estelle, “Hammer Girl” from THE RAID 2!). It seems like a very successful stare down until he turns around and gets a bottle smashed over his head. So for the whole movie he’s wearing a large bandage on his head that’s completely unrelated to the horror movie stuff that happens. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arifin Putra, Ario Bayu, cannibals, chainsaw fight, Daniel Mananta, Dendy Subangil, Imelda Therinne, Indonesia, Julie Estelle, Kimo Stamboel, Mo Brothers, Ruly Lubis, Shareefa Daanish, slashers, Timo Tjahjanto
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, October 26th, 2021
You know how it is, you love Clive Barker-based movies but you’ve seen HELLRAISER, NIGHTBREED, CANDYMAN and THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN a million times each, you’re not quite ready to try again on LORD OF ILLUSIONS, you even watched BOOKS OF BLOOD last year, but you want a little of that Barker movie kick, so it’s time for a Clive Dive. You gotta try some of the lesser ones out, see if you missed a good one, or if one you didn’t like back in the day is any better than you thought at the time.
So I tried one of each. The one I’d missed was the Masters of Horror episode Haeckel’s Tale, from 2006. It’s adapted by Mick Garris (THE FLY II) and directed by John McNaughton “in association with George A. Romero.” According to Wikipedia that just means Romero was supposed to direct it but had a scheduling problem. Around that time he was starting DIARY OF THE DEAD and announced a thing that never happened called SOLITARY ISLE, so it must’ve been one of those. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clive Barker, Denholm Elliott, Derek Cecil, George Pavlou, George Romero, Gerard Plunkett, John McNaughton, Jon Polito, Larry Lamb, Leela Savasta, Masters of Horror, Mick Garris, Micki Maunsell, mutants, Nicola Cowper, Steve Bacic, Steven Berkoff, Tom McBeath, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Monday, October 25th, 2021
BLOOD GAMES was released straight to VHS at the end of 1990, and made in 1989, but it feels more like something from the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. It’s about as elemental an exploitation movie as you could have, since it’s about a group of attractive women in short shorts fighting to the gory death with a bunch of sweaty redneck rapist shitbags. It’s not a great movie, but there’s something kinda beautiful about how it cranks the realities of misogyny so far into overdrive the story becomes almost mythic.
It’s written by men: story by Jim Makichuk (2 episodes of Highlander: The Series), screenplay by Craig Clyde & James Hennessy (CHINA O’BRIEN II) & George Saunders (BLOODSPORT 4: THE DARK KUMITE, BLACK ROSE). But it’s directed by a woman, Tanya Rosenberg, who has no other credits. According to an actor interview on the Vinegar Syndrome blu-ray she and the crew were Israeli, and that’s the complete sum of information I was able to find about her. In the tradition of the female directors making b-horror for Roger Corman, Rosenberg uses the same butt shots and locker room shower scenes as a dude would’ve, and puts them in underwear, crop tops or short shorts. But arguably her view of the sleazy, disgusting men who disrespect them is even more extreme than the industry standard. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cherie Tash, Craig Clyde, Don Dowe, George "Buck" Flower, George Saunders, Gregory Scott Cummins, James Hennessy, Ken Carpenter, Laura Albert, Randi Randolph, Ross Hagen, softball
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Friday, October 22nd, 2021
THERE’S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE (2021) is a horror movie that played Fantastic Fest this year and then came to Netflix. It’s a solid teen whodunit slasher very much in the post-SCREAM vein, but with some 2021 themes and concerns. I like that because it shows that this is a worthwhile format even when it’s not a remake, a sequel or a retro-styled throwback.
The title doesn’t describe the premise (unless in some poetic way that I’m not picking up on), but it does apply to a few of the suspense sequences, including the first one. It’s a SCREAM-like cold open but with a macho football player named Jackson (Markian Tarasiuk, CHRISTMAS JARS), talking to his friend on the phone and noticing odd things that make him think someone else is in the house. At first it’s things subtle enough to dismiss (what is this doing on the table?), but they escalate until he finds a trail of photos of himself punching someone bloody in a possibly homophobic bullying incident. Then he comes face to face with his killer – who is wearing a mask of his face. Yes, the killer wears 3D-printed masks of his victims, a technology invented by Darkman, but given new meaning here as the killer seems to want people to face their ugly selves. A very cool masked slasher gimmick because it has meaning, hasn’t really been done before, and looks creepy as fuck. Wouldn’t that freak you out even more than seeing Ghostface? As soon as you see it you know that you are the target and that some serious prep time has already gone into it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Asjha Cooper, Burkely Duffield, Dale Whibley, Diego Josef, Henry Gayden, Jesse LaTourette, Markian Tarasiuk, Patrick Brice, Sarah Dugdale, slashers, Stephanie Perkins, Sydney Park, Theodore Pellerin, whodunit slashers, William MacDonald
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Thursday, October 21st, 2021
“I don’t want to go out like that. I mean, when I die I wanna look pretty, I want to go down into the ground clean, one piece.”
Sometimes a good movie producer is a mastermind. Other times they don’t have an artistic vision themselves, but they have an eye for up and coming talent, for how to nurture them, give them opportunities to shine, protect them, help them bring their vision to life. Maybe Moustapha Akkad was one or all of those things, or maybe he just got really fuckin lucky and the kid he chose to direct “The Babysitter Murders” happened to be a genius who turned the gig into HALLOWEEN, a timeless horror masterpiece and the highest grossing independent movie of all time. I have no idea.
Whatever Akkad’s deal was, he never hit another one out of the park like the first HALLOWEEN. Eight of his twelve credits are on HALLOWEEN movies, none of them half as good as Carpenter’s. But I didn’t know what to expect from his one non-HALLOWEEN horror production, 1985’s APPOINTMENT WITH FEAR. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Smithee, Andrea Saparoff, Bruce Meade, Danny Dayton, Deborah Voorhees, Douglas Rowe, Fairlight CMI, Garrick Dowhen, Kerry Remsen, Malek Akkad, Michael Wyle, Michele Little, Mike Gomez, Moustapha Akkad, Nicholas von Sternberg, Ramzi Thomas, Slasher Search, Vincent Barbour
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 29 Comments »
