Horror Express is one of those public-domain horror films that comes up a lot in collections, but I think is sadly overlooked in favor of films that kicked off a genre, like Night of the Living Dead, or The Last Man On Earth and Vincent Price’s performance in that film. This is a damn shame – as Horror Express has Sir Christopher Lee and Sir Peter Cushing sharing a tremendous amount of screen time, with the two actors getting to play off each other in a way that they never got to with Hammer, and rarely got to with Amicus.
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Film Review: Silence of the Lambs
Very few horror films, and I’d consider Silence of the Lambs in that category (in spite of the book it was based on being credited as having killed the horror genre of novels), have won Academy Awards for Best Picture, never mind the level of sweep that Silence of the Lambs took. So, when I was going for a horror film for Halloween, I decided that Silence of the Lambs was the one to go with, as the last time I’d watched it was on a fairly small TV, and on DVD. Since then it’s gotten a 4K release (which is what I watched), and I have a larger TV to watch it on (and also better speakers), so I felt this was a good time to give it a real re-appraisal.
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Film Review: House of the Long Shadows
In 1983, when House of the Long Shadows came out, it was heavily panned by critics of the time as being derivative of the old film “Seven Keys to Broadpate”, that the ending undermined the story, and it didn’t have much for scares. I would argue that the critics of the time were simply not picking up what this movie is putting down.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
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Film Review: Tenebrae
Now that I’m caught up with the most recent anime reviews, it’s time to get back to the horror with some Dario Argento, and him returning to a more… conventional Giallo with Tenebrae. There will be some spoilers for a 20+ year old movie
Continue readingIt’s time for the Spooky Season – so let’s do some horror movies from outside the US – first off is Deep Red, a Giallo film from Dario Argento from before he did Susperia.
Film Review: The House That Dripped Blood
It’s not October without a review of an Amicus film, and this year I’ve got another Amicus Anthology here – the one with the title that grabbed my attention the most – The House That Dripped Blood. Unfortunately, it’s also probably the most disappointing I’ve seen to date.
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Film Review: Jigoku (1960)
We have our second horror review for the month, with the 1960 film Jigoku.
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Slaughterhouse Rock: Film Review
And now we move fully into the horror films with an ‘80s supernatural horror slasher film – Slaughterhouse Rock, with a bunch of college students being terrorized by a supernatural terror. Also, it’s scored by Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo, so it’s gotta be good – right? Right?
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Film Review: Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
It’s time for the first of my two horror film reviews for this year, with a look at the 1959 version of Ghost of Yotsuya.
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Santo & The Treasure of Dracula: Film Review
I have a soft spot for the El Santo movies. They are corny and campy, but universally sincere. No one in the films has any doubt that El Santo has the Doc Savage skill set he demonstrates over the series. There is no question that a professional wrestler can be a detective, an occultist, and a science hero. That said, the films are not without their flaws, and sadly Santo & the Treasure of Dracula is no exception.
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Cast a Deadly Spell: Film Review
Cast a Deadly Spell is interesting as a historical artifact. While the film wears the trappings of the Cthulhu mythos, with the Necronomicon being the focus of the plot, and the protagonist bearing the name of H. P. Lovecraft (though with a different first name than the spectacularly racist author), it has almost more in common with the Hardboiled Detective variety of Urban Fantasy that we now associate with books like the Harry Dresden series. It’s not by any stretch the first urban fantasy work – Mike Resnick’s John Justin Mallory novels and War for the Oaks pre-dates it, with Resnick’s series also being hard-boiled detective fiction. But by being a movie made for HBO, it provided the genre a level of visibility that it had never before seen. But is it good?
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Jigoku (1960): Film Review
What happens when you give the director of Ghost of Yotsuya $1.95 and a ham sandwich (or, in this case, 195 yen and an onigiri), say the studio is on the brink of bankruptcy and tell him to make a horror film – you get Jigoku. This is a dark, grim, surreal, and truly nightmarish film.
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Madhouse: Film Review
Madhouse is a very good film with a title that has effectively nothing to do with the plot, but that’s okay. It is – in short – Amicus making a very serious effort to do their take on giallo films, and they do fairly well.
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The Skull: Film Review
I have come to the conclusion that my first non-anthology Amicus film I watched, Scream and Scream Again, may have been an outlier, in terms of quality. By contrast, The Skull, while very light on narrative, has some very nicely done imagery and well done cinematography, which makes it an incredibly fun film.
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The Sentinel (1977): Film (Video) Review
I’m following up on my review of Paperbacks From Hell, with a video review of a novel covered in that book – 1977’s The Sentinel.
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Ghost of Yotsuya (1957): Movie Review
Ghost of Yotsuya is arguably a conventional horror film, though it’s one that also takes a little bit to get to the spooks. Like Kwaidan, it’s an adaptation of an existing horror story, in this case, one from a Kabuki play.
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Saturn 3: Movie Review
Saturn 3 feels like a film coming off of the environmental dystopia films of the 1970s – like Silent Running – combined with a bit of horror. However, having a cast smaller than that of Alien – just 3 actors – ultimately ends up working against the film.
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It Came From Beneath The Sea: Film Review
It Came From Beneath The Sea is the kind of giant monster movie I can enjoy mostly guilt free. No appliances glued or stapled onto animals – just good old fashioned, cruelty-free Ray Harryhausen stop-motion. It’s how Willis O’Brian did it – it’s how the movie industry had done, and at that point in the ‘50s it had worked pretty well so far.
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The Astro-Zombies: Film Review
The Astro-Zombies is, basically, 2-3 movies mashed together badly. They’re not mashed together in the editing room, like with the Godfrey Ho Ninja films, but in the screenwriting process.
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The Devil’s Rain: Film Review
The Devil’s Rain, like Scream and Scream Again, is not a good movie. It is a more competently shot film. However, its story is barely comprehensible and the dialog is painful to listen to, in spite of its solid cast.
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Scream and Scream Again: Film Review
Amicus Films greatest strength as a studio has been, in their films I’ve previously reviewed (like Tales from the Crypt and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) has been their anthology films. Their films were always fairly low budget, but the short form anthology film format allowed them to get good actors in for short narrative works. Scream and Scream Again shifts things by doing a more ambitious narrative, but one which stumbles out of the gate and is fumbled in its execution.
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Body Bags: Film Review
One of the genres where horror thrives is the Anthology film, and by “thrives” I mean that pretty much the only anthology films being made these days are horror films. Often, they take the framing narrative from EC Comics and it’s like – horror stories book-ended with a narrative by a ghoulish presenter of some form or another – you know, the classic Tales From the Crypt formula. Well, when HBO launched their Tales From The Crypt anthology TV series and films, Showtime filmed a pilot for their own, to be titled Body Bags. They didn’t decide to go forward, but did take the three filmed stories and turned them into their own anthology film.
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The Haunted Palace: Film Review
The Haunted Palace is, ostensibly, another of Roger Corman’s Edger Allen Poe adaptations, in this case doing a story based on one of Poe’s poems. However, it’s not that at all. Indeed, Poe’s poem barely shows up in the story in the first place. Instead, The Haunted Palace is more of an adaptation of one of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft – specifically, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, with a screenplay by Charles Beaumont (who I reviewed a documentary about a while back).
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