Posts Tagged ‘anthology’
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 »
Wednesday, May 25th, 2022
“Like Popeye says, ‘I yam what I yam,’ right?”
On May 1, 1992, Fine Line Features released Jim Jarmusch’s NIGHT ON EARTH on a mere 40 screens. By comparison, LEAVING NORMAL was released to 362 screens on the same day, and nobody ever heard of that one. But this was a well marketed limited release – I knew NIGHT ON EARTH existed, and in fact went to see it on one of those 40 screens, specifically the one that was upstairs at Seattle’s Harvard Exit Theatre (1968-2015).
This is Jarmusch’s fifth film. It’s possible I’d seen STRANGER THAN PARADISE and DOWN BY LAW already, but I suspect I rented them after seeing this. (I know I’d never heard of PERMANENT VACATION and saw MYSTERY TRAIN later.) So I may not have realized that by his standards it was kind of commercial: in Winona Ryder (who had BEETLEJUICE, HEATHERS and EDWARD SCISSORHANDS under her belt and was about to do BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA) he had his biggest movie star to date, and despite its simplicity it sure seems to have a bigger budget than his previous films, since it’s filmed on location in four different countries. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Beatrice Dalle, Frederick Elmes, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Esposito, Isaach De Bankolé, Jay Rabinowitz, Jim Jarmusch, Kari Vaananen, Matti Pellonpaa, Paolo Bonacelli, Roberto Benigni, Rosie Perez, Sakari Kuosmanen, Tom Waits, Tomi Salmela, Winona Ryder
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 15 Comments »
Monday, March 14th, 2022
FUTURE SHOCK is a 1994 horror(ish) anthology, it seems very made-for-cable, though it apparently was made-for-video. Or at least as a compilation it was – I believe it’s made from two pre-existing short films tied following a new story and a wraparound.
The connective material stars none other than Martin Kove, who was in a prolific post-KARATE-KID period of his career – that year he also appeared in WYATT EARP, WYATT EARP: RETURN TO TOMBSTONE (yes, a TV movie that came out the same year as the better known one), ENDANGERED, SAVAGE LAND, GAMBLER V: PLAYING FOR KEEPS, DEATH MATCH, CAGNEY & LACEY: THE RETURN, plus a Burke’s Law and a Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Here he’s rocking Swayze/Gibson style long hair, but playing a mostly buttoned down character, Dr. Langdon (yes, THE DA VINCI CODE was originally written as FUTURE SHOCK fan fiction but Kove refused to be in the movies because he knew they were gonna be fuckin boring, that’s why they almost didn’t make them and obviously regretted when they did [citation not necessary]), a psychiatrist who uses virtual reality to help his patients face their fears. (You see? In the form of little Twilight-Zone-ish short stories.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amanda Foreman, anthology, Bill Paxton, Brion James, David DuBos, Eric Parkinson, Greg Grunberg, J.J. Abrams, James Gray, James Karen, Martin Kove, Matt Reeves, Oley Sassone, Richard Hatem, Rick Rossovich, Sydney Lassick, Tim Doyle, Vivian Schilling
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, December 14th, 2021
A widely circulated anecdote about THE MATRIX (I believe coming from an interview on the DVD extras) says that when the Wachowskis pitched the movie to producer Joel Silver they showed him Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime film GHOST IN THE SHELL on video and said, “We wanna do that for real.”
The internet being the internet, that story evolved into the usual exaggerations – THE MATRIX is nearly a scene-for-scene remake, so close they had to ask permission, bullshit like that. There’s a cool video on Youtube showing images from THE MATRIX that seem inspired by or lifted from GHOST – lines of green code, plugs in the back of necks, a cool way that Neo lands – but it runs 1:16. There are quite a few other parts in THE MATRIX, in my opinion.
Still, the influence is undeniable, and the Wachowskis have been open about it. You can see what they were interested in there: the intersections between man and machine, super-powered battles in the midst of or above a large city, badasses in sunglasses taking on a bunch of armored cops, or being clawed at by inhuman machines. They did all that for real. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew R. Jones, anime, anthology, Carrie-Anne Moss, Clay Watson, Hedy Burress, James Arnold Taylor, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Michael Richardson, Mahiro Maeda, Melinda Clarke, Pamela Adlon, Peter Chung, Phil LaMarr, robots, Shin'ichiro Watanabe, Takeshi Koike, Victor Williams, Wachowskis, Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 23 Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2020
CAMPFIRE TALES is a very low budget horror anthology released in 1991. After directors William Cooke and Paul Talbot graduated from college in 1987 they decided to build a film around “The Hook,” a short they’d made in their senior year 16mm class. The stories are very simplistic – unusually light on gimmicks and ironic twists for this type of material – and the filmmaking is not what would traditionally be considered “good.” But being made by beginners with no money gives it that scrappy underdog charm where you’re excited for anything they kind of pull off, and since it was made by young people in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s there’s some relatability and nostalgia for somebody like me who may or may not have come of age around that time.
“The Hook” is set on Halloween, but there’s another story that’s about Christmas, which is what brought me to it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Christmas, Christmas horror, Gunnar Hansen, Halloween, Paul Talbot, pirates, William Cooke
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, December 26th, 2017
Happy Boxing Day to all of the boxers out there. I have a new review today that to be frankly honest is not gonna be very exciting for anybody because it’s a total obscurity that you never heard of and I’m not recommending it. But for some reason I wrote it, so I thought I should post it before it’s 2018 and I have to stop using the Slasher Search 2017 logo.
Ordinarily when I’m slasher searching I pin my hopes on movies from the ’80s. That was the prime time for filmatists to have caught the bug from HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, before they stopped the outbreak of Tom Savini fever and everything got too clean and slick and bland. If a slasher movie came out in the 2000s and I never heard of it I gotta assume it doesn’t have any of the things I’m looking for in the genre.
But I found this random one from 2005 that had a quote from the late great Dan O’Bannon on the box:
“…A CUT ABOVE THE COMPETITION… A THINKING MAN’S SLASHER FILM.”
So I decided to give it a shot. You can’t blame a guy for trying.
At first it’s unclear if there will actually be a slasher involved. The premise (explained concisely in first person narration at the beginning) is that Cassandra (Bobbie Jo Westphal, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP) once dreamt of her mother being murdered, and then what she dreamed really happened. Now she’s having dreams of old friends from school dying, so she’s invited them to an old farm house to try to keep these prophecies from coming true. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Michael Hawkins-Burgos, Slasher Search
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Monday, December 12th, 2016
A CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY is a misleading title because 1) it’s not a horror version of A CHRISTMAS STORY and 2) it’s more than one Christmas horror story. It’s an anthology of several but it jumps around between them like CLOUD ATLAS or something.
This one is made by the Canadians. As a country they know their shit, in my opinion, having given us at least two of the Christmas genre classics, BLACK CHRISTMAS and THE SILENT PARTNER. This will not be added to that list, but it’s worth a watch.
The story begins on Christmas Eve at a spooky North Pole, where a ragged looking Santa Claus (George Buza, THE CHRISTMAS SWITCH, THE CASE FOR CHRISTMAS, A CHRISTMAS WEDDING, SNAKE EATER II: THE DRUG BUSTER) is preparing for his flight. Something seems wrong, and when he turns around there’s a bloody slash across his face. Then it skips to 12 hours earlier. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A.C. Peterson, Adrian Holmes, anthology, Brett Sullivan, Canadian, Christmas, Christmas horror, Corrine Conley, Grant Harvey, Krampus, Olunike Adeliyi, Santa Claus, Steven Hoban
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, November 8th, 2016
A year before TALES FROM THE HOOD was a black Tales From the Crypt, the Hudlin brothers’ HBO TV movie COSMIC SLOP was “a multi-cultural Twilight Zone.” Even if the VHS cover didn’t have a Chicago Tribune quote calling it that, you’d get the idea from the intro, when a trail of terrible 2D computer animated objects (basketball, rolling pin, chair, bust of Beethoven, electric guitar, bra, asterisk) float in under George Clinton’s familiar “free your mind and your ass will follow” narration and a re-recording of the 1973 Funkadelic song that the title comes from.
It’s even lower budget than TALES and much cheesier, with crude, video toaster style digital effects. It’s clearly a pilot for a show they decided not to make, but it’s another admirable attempt to bring a different perspective to the tradition of short genre stories that explore social issues.
Clinton’s disembodied head floats in, on fire, a blinking animatronic third eye on his forehead, and morphs between different hairstyles as he cryptically Rod Serlings a trio of stories with his cryptic afro-futurist catch phrases. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Casey Kasem, Chester Himes, Chi McBride, Derrick Bell, George Clinton, Kevin Rodney Sullivan, made-for-cable-movies, Michele Lamar Richards, Nicholas Turturro, P-Funk, Paula Jai Parker, racism, Reginald Hudlin, Robert Guillaume, Roger Guenveur Smith, Trey Ellis, Warrington Hudlin
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »
Monday, November 7th, 2016
“This ain’t a funeral home. It ain’t the Terrordome neither!”
Here’s a movie that’s very much of the ’90s. After BOYZ N THE HOOD, STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN, NEW JACK CITY, SOUTH CENTRAL, JUICE and MENACE II SOCIETY established the genre of the “hood movie,” FEAR OF A BLACK HAT director Rusty Cundieff decided to mix it with the format of the anthology horror movie. Like those other movies it’s a low budget indie movie trying to get across messages about issues facing the black community, but with Twilight Zone type ironic morals and some crazy special effects and stuff. Spike Lee (whose CLOCKERS came out the same year) acted as executive producer to help get it made.
The wraparound story takes place in Simms Funeral Parlor, where three young drug dealers meet with the crazy-eyed, puffy-haired, organ-playing weirdo (Clarence Williams III, PURPLE RAIN) who runs the place. He claims to have found a bunch of drugs in an alley, but before they can make a transaction he starts opening up coffins and telling them the stories of the occupants’ deaths. As you do. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Corbin Bernsen, Darin Scott, David Alan Grier, De'aundre Bonds, Duane Whitaker, Joe Torry, Michael Massee, Roger Geunveur Smith, Rosalind Cash, Rusty Cundieff, Samuel Monroe Jr., Screaming Mad George, Spike Lee, Tom Wright, Wings Hauser
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 19 Comments »
