Trog, as a film, is probably one of the more lazy and derivative horror films I’ve seen. However, it accomplishes this not by knocking off one genre of horror films, but several all at once, in an effort to turn it into some kind of horror cinema Dagwood. It doesn’t succeed, but it does manage to be entertaining in the attempt, but not in the ways they intended.
Read moreI’m wrapping up my October horror reviews with an Academy Award winner – Silence of the Lambs.
It’s been a while since I’ve discussed a Dario Argento film, so it’s time to get back to some Giallo with Tenebrae.
We have more Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee this week, with the Public Domain horror classic, Horror Express.
Kicking off my October Spooky Horror reviews with the underrated Cannon films horror-comedy House of the Long Shadows.
Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein is a film I knew – erroneously – by a presumed reputation. It was credited as the film that ended the long-running Universal Monsters series. Allegedly, it took the wind out of the monsters and made it so no one could take them seriously anymore. Having, at long last, seen the film, I feel like I can say with a degree of confidence that at as far as the film’s intent is concerned, nothing is further from the truth.
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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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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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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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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
Read moreIt’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.
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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We have our second horror review for the month, with the 1960 film Jigoku.
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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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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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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 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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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 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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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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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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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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