Archive for the ‘Horror’ Category
Tuesday, November 28th, 2023
TAMARA may or may not be obscure enough to qualify for Slasher Search, but it’s harder to define now that I’m doing 21st century movies. Its hook is that it’s from Jeffrey Reddick, writer of FINAL DESTINATION. Apparently it had an unprofitable theatrical release in 2005, a time of terrible fonts and faux-distressed poster art. I recognized the cover from the video store, but only when I found it on Tubi did I wonder what its deal was and click on it.
The part that piqued my curiosity is that the title character is played by former Janet Jackson backup dancer Jenna Dewan a year before she starred in the first STEP UP movie. Tamara is, as described in the IMDb plot summary, “an unattractive girl who is picked on by her peers,” and it plays like kind of a CARRIE ripoff for a while. She’s a shy, awkward girl, is mercilessly bullied by the (cartoonishly obnoxious) popular kids, and isn’t helped by a crushingly miserable home life with a terrible single parent. In her case it’s her dad (Chris Sigurdson) who’s still around, and he’s a sleazy, molesty drunk. And instead of going home and being made to pray to Jesus, she secretly practices witchcraft. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bryan Clark, Chris Sigurdson, Claudette Mink, Gil Hacohen, Jeffrey Reddick, Jenna Dewan, Jeremy Haft, Katie Stuart, Marc Devigne, Matthew Marsden, Melissa Elias
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, November 21st, 2023
As I promised before Halloween, I’ve continued scouring Tubi for potential Slasher Search material. It’s been a struggle so far. Most of the things I’ve clicked on turn out to be hard to get through and easy to give up on. For example I tried to watch one called HAUNTED TRAIL because it was directed by A RAGE IN HARLEM star Robin Givens and I thought that was interesting that she directed a horror movie, but I lost patience before anything happened. When I don’t have to pick out a finite number of tapes or discs and carry them home my remote finger is itchier.
So for now here’s one that I actually found on DVD, and it’s not available streaming, but it’s an obscurity from the aughts that seems very Tubi-appropriate to me. HACK! (2007) fits squarely and stupidly into the meta-slasher tradition even though it’s a full eleven years after SCREAM. The characters keep talking about horror movies, and the killer(s) is/are trying to make one. But please note the scene where a guy swears he saw a scary clown in the woods and they ask if he looked like Captain Spaulding, explaining that that’s a character from HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES and then explaining that that’s a Rob Zombie movie. It’s a reminder that this is, what – three horror cycles after SCREAM? But they don’t seem to have learned anything substantial from any of them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrienne Frantz, Burt Young, Danica McKellar, Gabrielle Richens, Jay Kenneth Johnson, Juliet Landau, Justin Chon, Lochlyn Munro, Matt Flynn, meta-slashers, Sean Kanan, slashers, Tony Burton, Travis Schuldt, Won-G
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 15 Comments »
Monday, November 20th, 2023
Throughout the 16 (!) years since GRINDHOUSE, there’s been talk about Eli Roth turning his fake trailer THANKSGIVING into a real movie. Now it’s finally here and the unexpected thing about it that might not have happened if he’d made it earlier (like when he was talking about it as a double feature with Edgar Wright’s DON’T) is that he didn’t repeat the grimy faux-‘80s style of the trailer. Instead he took the premise, a couple of kills and the climax and adapted them into a straight-faced, contemporary horror movie, almost like it’s the modern remake of the movie in the original trailer. And I’m thankful for that it’s sweeter than pumpkin pie How do you like them sweet potatoes? I think it was a good choice.
It’s a holiday slasher movie in the year 2023, obviously it knows you know it’s silly, but it’s acting in good faith. It’s less of a comedy than JACK FROST or MACHETE. There’s kind of a post-SCREAM feel to it but it’s ‘80s in its construction. It asks okay, if this is the slasher movie for Thanksgiving then what are the things we gotta do? Pilgrims, turkeys, corn on the cob, potato mashers? As in the trailer, it’s set in Plymouth Massachusetts, there’s a killer in a pilgrim hat, there’s a parade where a guy in a turkey costume gets beheaded, people are tied up at a table and served a human cooked like a turkey. But now there’s also a story and characters and what not. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adison Rae, Chris Sandiford, Eli Roth, Gabriel Davenport, Gina Gershon, holiday horror, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Jenna Warren, Joe Delfin, Karen Cliche, Milo Manheim, Nell Verlaque, Patrick Dempsey, Rick Hoffman, slashers, Thanksgiving, Tomaso Sanelli, Ty Olsson
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 17 Comments »
Wednesday, November 15th, 2023
TIKTIK: THE ASWANG CHRONICLES is a Filipino monster movie I came across on the medium of digital video disc. The box also calls it THE MONSTER CHRONICLES: TIKTIK. I had to watch it because I noticed it was written and directed by Erik Matti, whose 2018 action movie BUYBUST I loved (it’s the closest thing to a “Filipino THE RAID” that I know of) and then I watched his excellent crime drama ON THE JOB (2013).
TIKTIK came out the year before ON THE JOB, but it was well into Matti’s career – looks like it’s his twelfth film. Though it’s not nearly as broad, it reminds me a little of some of the Hong Kong horror comedies I’ve seen, because it’s about a relationship problem and a family and then a bunch of monster shit happens at the same time.
Makoy (Dingdong Dantes) is a cocky young man from Manila who comes to the boonies of Pulupandan wearing sunglasses, smoking cigarettes, talking abrasively, offending everybody. He came to try to make up with his pregnant girlfriend Sonia (Lovi Poe) after a fight. She went to stay with her parents, who he’s never met, and when he shows up Sonia’s mother Fely (Janice de Belen) hits him with a pan and chases him off. But he later runs into her father, Nestor (Joey Marquez, ON THE JOB), who is more welcoming and brings him along to buy a pig to roast for Sonia’s birthday party the next day. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: aswang, Dingdong Dantes, Erik Matti, Filipino horror, Joey Marquez, Lovi Poe, Ramon Bautista
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Monster | 4 Comments »
Monday, November 6th, 2023
Okay, it’s weird to post a review of a Halloween movie the week after Halloween, but what am I gonna do? I watched it on Halloween. These things take time to write, but not a whole year. I’m posting it now for the record.
The big horror movie phenomenon of Halloween season 2022 was TERRIFIER 2, the unrated gorefest and low budget box office sleeper. The hype caused me to catch up with the first TERRIFIER and then I survived the gauntlet of the sequel so I’m now a ticket-holding passenger on this grimy franchise about a sadistic, thankfully non-verbal, apparently supernatural clown who goes around horribly mutilating random people on Halloween, in ways that he finds amusing.
So this Halloween evening I decided to go back to the roots of the series. Like many aspiring horror directors before they’re able to get a feature film off the ground, makeup artist/writer/director/editor Damien Leone got his start creating horror shorts. The character of Art the Clown first appeared in his 2006 short The 9th Circle, before starring in the 2011 short also called Terrifier. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Damien Leone, Halloween, Jesse Baget, Katie Maguire
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, October 31st, 2023
Every Halloween if I’m able to I like to write an essay on one of the great horror movies. This particular one is very important to me in part because it’s the specific movie that turned me into a horror fan. I’ve written about it before but here I try to get at both why I still love it and how it speaks to me about the world today. Hopefully I’ve done it justice. Happy Halloween, everyone.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET begins either in the past or a dream. A montage plays inside a rectangle within the larger frame, in which the hands of Fred Krueger (Robert Englund, SLASHED DREAMS) construct what will be a major element of his iconography: his four-bladed right-hand glove. Maybe the thought at the time was that a horror movie couldn’t just jump out with a crazy weapon like that – they had to establish it.
The scene fades to black as the title comes up, and the next shot, of the blades cutting through fabric, fills the screen. We’re definitely in a dream as Tina (Amanda Wyss, FORCE: FIVE) runs from a white void into a flooded, steaming, labyrinthine boiler room where she’s stalked by Freddy, who calls her name, cackles, makes his (new?) claws squeal against metal like fingers on a chalkboard. Right when he grabs her she wakes up, escaping into reality, but she finds four slashes in her nightgown. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amanda Wyss, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Nick Corri, Robert Englund, Ronee Blakley, Wes Craven
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 9 Comments »
Monday, October 30th, 2023
I enjoy the work of director Jeremy Saulnier. He did the bleak, regular-dude-sloppily-getting-revenge movie BLUE RUIN in 2013, followed by the punks vs. bigots favorite GREEN ROOM in 2015, and then he kind of went off the radar because HOLD THE DARK (2018) only exists in the mists of Netflix, but I liked that one too.
Those three movies paint a certain picture of what kind of filmmaker Saulnier might be. They may have moments of humor, but they’re all very grim and dry, the emphasis on their unblinking look into the dark fringes of life, with a particular fascination for people not too cool to step into enormous fuck ups and messes that movie characters usually don’t. In BLUE RUIN, for example, the protagonist steals a gun to use in a murder, but it has a lock on it, so he tries to break it off with a rock, and breaks the gun. In HOLD THE DARK a guy shoots at cops from a barn with a high powered rifle and they just scurry around helplessly for several minutes until our protagonist gets a gun and takes careful aim… and then he can’t hit him either.
What I think is fairly unknown or forgotten about Saulnier is that his first film, a whole six years before the wide acclaim of BLUE RUIN, presents that view of life in the context of a straight-up horror comedy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Beau Sia, Bill Tangradi, Chris Sharp, Halloween, Jeremy Saulnier, Macon Blair, Paul Goldblatt, Stacy Rock
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 9 Comments »
Friday, October 27th, 2023
Many years back I wrote about SLEEPAWAY CAMP, a unique and noteworthy slasher sleazefest from two-time East Coast indie filmmaker Robert Hiltzik. I also reviewed his only followup, the lesser known but similarly crazy RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP. But until now I never returned to the two odd sequels from the late ‘80s, from the production company behind BLOOD RAGE and some Frank Stallone movies. Because they were new when I came of horror age they actually made way more of an impression on me growing up than the grimier original did.
These ones have a totally different feel, much more tongue-in-cheek, but still pretty befuddling. They were shot back-to-back (you know, like the BACK TO THE FUTURE or THE MATRIX trilogies), and you can tell, though they kindly switch up the premise slightly. Both are directed by Michael A. Simpson (FUNLAND) and written by Michael Hitchcock (WHERE THE DAY TAKES YOU) under the pseudonym Fritz Gordon. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carol Chambers, Fritz Gordon, Justin Nowell, Michael A. Simpson, Michael J. Pollard, Pamela Springsteen, Renee Estevez, Sandra Dorsey, slashers, Valerie Hartman, Walter Gotell
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 4 Comments »
Thursday, October 26th, 2023
THE BIRDS. By Alfred Hitchcock. The one where the birds attack. Good movie. He was a total bastard to Tippi Hedren but she was good in it. Her first movie. Then she raised Melanie Griffith and a bunch of lions.
Hedren plays Melanie Daniels, and what I definitely didn’t properly appreciate the last time I saw this as a younger person is what a great weirdo Melanie is. During the large portion of the movie where the disaster hasn’t fully made itself known it’s just a funny story about a woman behaving very unreasonably, and not giving a shit, because it amuses her. She’s fun to watch.
It starts in a San Francisco bird store, where Melanie is trying to buy a myna bird. A man named Mitch (Rod Taylor, 101 DALMATIANS, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) starts talking to her like she works there, asking about buying a pair of lovebirds for his 11-year-old sister’s birthday. She plays along, but it turns out he knows she doesn’t work there, he’s a lawyer and recognizes her from a court appearance over some unknown prank she played that “resulted in the smashing of a plate glass window.” For some reason he starts giving her a bunch of shit about it.
“What are you? A policeman?” she asks.
“I simply believe in the law, Miss Daniels, and I’m not too keen on practical jokers.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Smithee, Alfred Hitchcock, Brad Johnson, Bruce Surtees, Chelsea Field, James Naughton, Jan Rubes, Jessica Tandy, Jim Wheat, Ken Wheat, killer animals, made-for-cable-movies, made-for-TV-sequels, Megan Gallacher, Richard K. Olsen, Rick Rosenthal, Robert Eisele, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Tippi Hedren, Veronica Cartwright
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, October 25th, 2023
Every October for the last 14 years I’ve been doing what I call “Slasher Search,” where I try to scrounge up some obscure slasher movies you probly never heard of, preferably from the ‘80s, and usually still only available on VHS. Originally the hope was to discover some little-known gems from this particular subgenre and era I enjoy, or at least get to dissect some strange ones, and I achieved those things for a long time. But between the finite number of stomachable films of this type, my deep scraping of the barrel, and the fine work of Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and other blu-ray companies to shine their bigger spotlights on movies like this, I’m having a hard time finding fresh material these days. There will always be new horror out there to discover, but not ones that I considered eligible for the name Slasher Search.
I started to think I was reaching the end of the line last year, but some of you kindly encouraged me to keep going even if it meant adjusting the rules to a different type of movie. So I’m taking your advice. This year I’ll try exploring a different era of also-ran low budget exploitation by treating Tubi (and possibly other ad-supported streaming services) as my video store, searching for titles I’ve never heard of, to see if I can find some watchable ones. I went through a page of 1,000 horror titles and jotted down a long list of not-well-known vaguely slasher-ish ones, and I’ll pick some out to sample. We’ll see how it goes. No guarantees are being made. (Except that I started late due to all that EXORCIST business so most of the posts will come after Halloween.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Ashmore, Alyson Richards, Bruce Wemple, Dylan Grunn, Grant Schumacher, LGBT horror, Pat Mills, Rick Montgomery Jr., Sarah Allen, Tommie-Amber Pirie, wendigo
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 11 Comments »
