Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category
Monday, November 18th, 2019
DR. GIGGLES is not the best kind of horror movie, but it’s a kind I like: the kind that knowingly, shamelessly embraces absurdity and formula. It says okay, I am a slasher movie, my theme is “a killer doctor,” step aside and I will do my thing. So you kinda know what it’s gonna be, and you get a laugh from some of the specific choices or smile with satisfaction when that thing you were assuming had to happen does happen.
We first see the good doctor (Larry Drake in his feature film followup to DARKMAN) demonstrating an experimental surgery to his colleagues in the observation deck. But then we realize that he’s not supposed to be doing this – he’s escaped his cell in a mental institution, he’s cutting up one of the doctors, and the “colleagues” are other patients. Security there nicknamed him Dr. Giggles because he’s a John Doe and he does indeed giggle alot. Drake is so good at the creepy giggling I wonder if he brought it to the character and they rebuilt the movie around it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cliff DeYoung, Dark Horse Comics, Doug E. Doug, Glenn Quinn, Holly Marie Combs, Keith Diamond, Larry Drake, Manny Coto, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 16 Comments »
Monday, November 11th, 2019
As a young man I read a bunch of Stephen King. He was my favorite until I decided Clive Barker was more interesting – I don’t know if I was right. The point is I’m just another movie-watching asshole and can’t pretend to be a King scholar. I haven’t read The Shining (1977) or its 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep. I have, of course, seen Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING, and like everyone except King and the Razzies voters I think it’s a masterpiece. (I also just realized it’s the first horror movie I remember seeing.)
It almost seemed like a suicide mission for writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan (OCULUS, HUSH, GERALD’S GAME) to make a movie out of Doctor Sleep. How do you even make a sequel to one of the most unfuckwithable horror movies ever made – a fucking Stanley Kubrick movie – let alone try to please the author who famously hated the movie’s take on his very personal story about alcoholism? He tried to bridge the movie with the books, and I think he pulled it off! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Essoe, Carel Struycken, Carl Lumbly, Cliff Curtis, Ewan McGregor, Jacob Tremblay, Mike Flanagan, Rebecca Ferguson, Stephen King, Zahn McClarnon
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 75 Comments »
Thursday, October 31st, 2019
THE HILLS HAVE EYES is not my favorite Wes Craven movie, but in a certain sense it’s one of his purest. It has that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT maniac-college-professor vibe – another raw, seedy gut-punch of a drive-in movie layered with completely sincere themes and social commentary. And it’s a little more fantastical than LAST HOUSE, with less straight up degradation, so I don’t feel as ashamed for liking it.
Instead of a gang of criminals we have a literal tribe of modern primitives – the wicked spawn of Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth, THE CANDY SNATCHERS), born “40 pounds and hairy as a monkey” in Nevada, mutated by nuclear tests and the nearby Air Force gunnery range, grew to adult size too fast, burned down his parents’ home, his dad split his face open with a tire iron and left him in the desert to die, but he survived in the hills and kidnapped some poor prostitute (Cordy Clark) “to raise a passel of wild kids” with. They wear animal parts and pieces of junk as trophies, and like the buzzards in the sky they stay above, keeping watch below, waiting to see what the highway brings them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Dee Wallace, Don Peake, James Whitworth, Janus Blythe, Martin Speer, Michael Berryman, Peter Locke, Robert Burns, Robert Houston, Russ Grieve, Susan Lanier, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, October 30th, 2019
MA is a pretty simple little Blumhouse thriller that doesn’t go much deeper than what you see in the trailer, but I had fun with it. Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer (HALLOWEEN II) plays the titelistical matriarch, a.k.a. Sue Ann, a single veterinarian’s assistant in a small town in Ohio who is randomly approached one day by some high school kids who want her to buy them alcohol. Not only does she hook them up that one time, she becomes their regular buyer. And then she decides to let them use her basement as their party space. She’s like a cool, irresponsible aunt. She jokes around inappropriately sometimes, but tells them she’d rather they be here than out driving drunk or something. (Plan A was to party in a van.)
There are a couple obvious ways to play this. One would be to draw out the reveal of whether or not Ma is a psycho. I like that they immediately show her looking up the kids’ Facebook pages like a stalker. There are two other major escalations in craziness that happened so abruptly I got a big laugh and wished I’d seen this with an audience. The suspense is in how far she’s gonna take this. And there’s tension about things like “why is she so insistent that they not see the upstairs” and “will Maggie (Diana Silvers, BOOKSMART) be able to make her friends and her boyfriend Andy (Corey Fogelmanis, Girl Meets World) see that this lady is trouble?” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Blumhouse, Corey Fogelmanis, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans, Missi Pyle, Octavia Spencer, Tate Taylor
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 34 Comments »
Monday, October 28th, 2019
SHREDDER is a snowboarding-themed slasher movie that I never heard of until now, but apparently somebody had, because RoninFlix put it out on blu-ray with a nice painted cover by Devon Whitehead (designer of many fine t-shirts from Fright Rags and Cavity Colors). It’s from 2001 (shelved until 2003 in the U.S.), but seems late-‘80s in its “we know this is dumb, but we’ll take it seriously because that’s more fun” spirit. It’s clearly not made by a studio, and shows very little of the SCREAM-inspired postmodern attitude of its actual era.
It’s about a mysterious skier (disguised only by normal ski gear) who murders snowboarders who trespass in a closed pass where a fatal accident once happened. Like my other recent 2003 Slasher Search entry, SIMON SAYS, it has a vanload of young people on a trip, slathering the screen with unadulterated obnoxiousness. The stuck up/aggressive girl is trip-arranger Kimberly Van Arx (Lindsey McKeon, Saved by the Bell: The New Class), whose rich dad is buying the resort, and has a quick trigger finger when it comes to asserting “do you know who I am!?” privileges. Her boyfriend Cole (Scott Weinger) seems kind of square and has a has kind of a Steve-on-90210 older-out-of-place-guy vibe. I was excited to learn that he’s the guy who did the voice of Disney’s Aladdin! (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy O', Brad Hawkins, Greg Huson, Lindsey McKeon, Scott Weinger, Slasher Search, slashers, snowboarding
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Friday, October 25th, 2019
In SATANIC PANIC – a new Fangoria Films release that came out on disc this week after film festival and VOD runs – Sam (Hayley Griffith) is working her first shift delivering pizzas. She’s completely broke and low on gas, and her skeevy co-workers stick her with deliveries to a notoriously stingy neighborhood. This would be shitty, but not disastrous, if only she didn’t get desperate and storm into a mansion to demand a tip… during a satanic sacrifice ritual to raise the demon Baphomet. See, it’s a time sensitive full moon thing, they’re short one virgin, and through contrived but humorous dialogue they figure out that Sam fits the bill. So she’s gonna have bigger problems than lack of gas money.
You know I’m a sucker for these class tension stories. Sam works for $2.30 an hour plus tips and these upper class assholes refuse to chip in – just as Lucifer would want it. Danica Ross (Rebecca Romijn, FEMME FATALE) leads the coven, a villainous type of role I’ve never seen her in, and she clearly has a fun time. Even better is her squeaky-voiced hippie-turbaned rival Gypsy Neumieir (Arden Myrin, Mad TV), whose disagreements with Danica’s blood sacrifice plans play like some drama at the planning committee for a pancake social. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arden Myrin, Chelsea Stardust, Dallas Sonnier, Fangoria Films, Grady Hendrix, Hayley Griffith, Jerry O'Connell, Jordan Ladd, Rebecca Romijn, Ruby Modine, satanic cult, Ted Geoghegan
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews | 9 Comments »
Thursday, October 24th, 2019
LADY STAY DEAD (1981) is a rare VHS I have considered and backed away from for many a Slasher Search because the dude on the cover… I don’t know what it is about him, but his picture suggests the slimiest and most unpleasant of backyard filth-wallowers. This year after checking IMDb ratings and plot summaries on the more obscure VHS available I decided to check it out, and then I discovered I could watch it on a Blu-Ray released by Code Red. They’ve put out some pretty seedy stuff, so it’s hard to know if that’s a good sign or not.
Turns out this is not at all the no budget regional sicko movie I pictured. It’s an Australian film, a pretty slick one with good production value, though with disturbing content. It opens in a beautiful beachfront villa (filmed in Palm Beach, Sydney), where 24 year old singing sensation Marie Colbie (Deborah Coulls, ROBBERY UNDER ARMS) – who just goes by her first name, like Tiffany – starts her morning with a naked dip in her pool that overlooks the actual water. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Chard Hayward, Deborah Coulls, James Elliott, Louise Howitt, Roger Ward, Slasher Search, stalker, Terry Bourke
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019
My original goal with Slasher Search was to find the ‘70s and ‘80s slasher gems that I (and maybe everybody) had been missing. That’s still my hope, but as the pickings get slimmer and the years move on I might as well open it up to a movie like this – it’s from 2006, but I never heard of it, and it seemed promising from the box. The premise sounded potentially fun (Crispin Glover killing campers in the woods with elaborate contraptions) and it was even by a known director, Bill Dear, the co-writer of T2.
Or that’s what I was thinking, but that’s William Wisher. Bill Dear is the director of HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS, IF LOOKS COULD KILL and ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD. And in many ways this does live up to what you expect in a gory horror movie from a guy known for cheesy family movies. It’s about a vanload of horny youths going on a camping trip, and they’re about as broad as they come. They’re all complete assholes who are trying to cheat on their girlfriends or steal their friend’s boyfriends. They like to stick their junk in each others’ faces and trespass and act obnoxious to the locals. It seems like there’s a rule that any scene where the viewer went more than a minute without wanting to punch one of the characters in the face had to be excised. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Artie Baxter, Bill Dear, Blake Lively, Carrie Finklea, Crispin Glover, Greg Cipes, Kelly Vitz, Margo Harshman, Slasher Search
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Monday, October 21st, 2019
Let me try to explain this in pizza terms. You know how every once in a while you might get a pizza, and it’s not of the highest possible quality? They got all the ingredients there, but maybe the proportions are a little off, or it was cooked too much or too little or something, so it’s not the greatest, but at the same time it has crust and sauce and cheese and toppings and those ingredients together are always gonna taste pretty good? THE SEVENTH CURSE is like that. It’s kind of too gooey and falling apart but it has pineapple, fake ham and jalapenos, and that’s pretty much my favorite toppings. (I’ve come to prefer Mama Lil’s Peppers*, but this one needed more spice.)
It’s a supernatural action adventure with Chow Yun Fat playing the pipe-smoking occult expert Wisely (called Wesley on the subtitles of the DVD I rented), a character from a series of 156(!) novels. In this one he’s kind of a supporting character because it’s based on another book series centered on his colleague Dr. Yuen, here played by Chin Siu-ho (TAI CHI MASTER, FIST OF LEGEND). The books are by Ni Kuang, who in between writing enough novels to make Stephen King look like a lazy no good piece of shit also found the time to bang out screenplays for DIRTY HO, THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, HEROES OF THE EAST, THE 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER, and literally hundreds of other movies.
He didn’t write this one (that was Wong Jing [MERCENARIES FROM HONG KONG] and Yuen Gai-chi [DRUNKEN MASTER II]), but would you believe he hosts it? It opens with him, playing himself, surrounded by women and talking to the camera.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chin Siu Ho, Chow Yun Fat, Dick Wei, Elvis Tsui, Lam Nai-Choi, Ni Kuang, Wisely, Wong Jing, Yuen Bun, Yuen Gai-chi
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Friday, October 18th, 2019
(I guess I should always say this, but SPOILERS)
The psychotic Firefly clan – introduced in Rob Zombie’s HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (2003) and made more vivid in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005) are finally back in 3 FROM HELL, another mix of sun-soaked fugitive murder spree and stylized cartoon that’s at least a little bit of a comeback for Zombie after the crowd-funded 31 (2016). That one had nice cinematography and performances but it was such a limp “I guess this is the kind of shit you expect from me?” greatest hits throwaway I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to write a review.
Since 3 FROM HELL is not as good as REJECTS, and not as big of a leap from its previous chapter, it doesn’t feel entirely necessary. And that makes it harder to ignore the hollowness of these movies. As far as I can tell they’re not saying much, just trying to be provocatively inappropriate, and they’re less about human beings than about Zombie’s fetishes: weird clowns, redneck chic, tattoos, bushy beards, satanic symbols, Manson Family nostalgia, ’70s rock montages, kitschy western gear over cheeky retro-t-shirts, black and white monster movies playing on old TVs. But I can appreciate most of that stuff, so I can enjoy an occasional dip into Zombie’s distinct mix of uncomfortably fucked up shit, cool visuals, some laughs and some stretches where you realize you’re too invested in these terrible people and feel like an asshole. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Moseley, Clint Howard, Daniel Roebuck, Danny Trejo, Dee Wallace, Emilio Rivera, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Pancho Moler, Richard Brake, Richard Edson, Rob Zombie, Sean Whalen, Sheri Moon Zombie, Sid Haig
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 38 Comments »
