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.
Continue reading “The Skull: Film 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.
Continue reading “The Sentinel (1977): Film (Video) 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.
Continue reading “Ghost of Yotsuya (1957): 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 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 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, 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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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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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 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).
Continue reading “The Haunted Palace: Film Review”This time I’m reviewing a Golden Harvest film featuring Jiangshi.
Continue reading “Mr. Vampire: Film (Video) Review”
Since we’re spending so much time cooped up indoors, I give my thoughts on a Base Under Siege horror movie.
Continue reading “Phase IV: Video Review”
The last Lucio Fulci film I watched was The Black Cat, and while it was a pretty decent horror film, I will say it didn’t quite get into Fulci’s reputation as an extreme gorehound. The Beyond, part of his “Gates of Hell trilogy” and one of the films to make the Video Nasties, on the other hand, definitely fits that criteria.
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Horror films about vampires in the present day are kind of interesting to me. We live in a time where the concepts of how vampires “work” are common knowledge enough that on the one hand, you don’t need to explain the concepts to an audience. That said, we also are in a world of skepticism, so characters generally shouldn’t buy into the idea of vampires being real at first glance either. Count Yorga, Vampire is probably one of the earlier films I’ve seen that takes on this concept, even pre-dating Hammer’s attempts at the concept.
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I haven’t watched a lot of “Kids on Bikes” movies and fiction – I’ve seen ET, Explorers, and The Goonies, and as of this writing am currently in the middle of reading IT (which is something of a Kids on Bikes story for the flashback sequences) but I haven’t seen or read any of the other works that really feed into subsequent works like Stranger Things. I haven’t seen Monster Squad, and until recently, I hadn’t seen The Gate – a lesser-known work in the genre that I hadn’t heard about until Giant Bomb did a “Film and 40s” commentary for it with the Giant Beast crew. Well, this oversight has, at long last, been rectified.
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I wrap up my October horror reviews with a movie that has a much stronger sense of visual flair and style to it than Mother of Tears, and is from Canada instead of Italy – Beyond the Black Rainbow.
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Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural is a vampire film that’s been on my watch list for a while. I’ve seen it praised for its theme and tone, but due to the film’s cast and how relatively unknown the director was – and it’s limited DVD release – never really bumped it up my list. Why do a little known vampire film from a director known more for co-writing Eating Raoul than anything else, and starring an actress known for myriad sexploitation films over, say, a film by Amicus? On a whim, I bumped this to the top of my DVD Netflix Queue and gave it a try – and it wasn’t exactly worth the wait.
Continue reading “Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural – Film Review”
With going through the numerous anime from last season that I watched, I have ended up being somewhat behind in my other horror film reviews for the year. So, I need to make up for lost time – with Futureworld, the sequel to a horror film I watched a couple of years ago, Westworld.
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This time we come to the final, and worst, installment of the Three Mothers trilogy, Mother of Tears.
Continue reading “Mother of Tears: Film (Video) Review”
My October Horror reviews begin with the 1977 version of Suspiria, as we make our way through Dario Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy.
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The Hellboy movie series has been re-booted, now without Guillermo Del Toro and after superhero movies, in general, have become more mainstream. How does this new film fare?
Continue reading “Hellboy (2019) – Movie (Vlog) Review”
I haven’t necessarily seen a lot of pre-Hays Code films. A few of the classic Universal horror films pre-dated the code, like Dracula. However, the 1932 film Island of Lost Souls, is one that I’d been meaning to watch but I’d never gotten around to, until now.
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I learned about The Sentinel first through the book Paperbacks from Hell, where it was described as a book made in the wake of the success of The
When it comes to horror and documentaries, in the sense of horror films that are deliberately planned to be documentaries, you have two main stripes represented by two big names. On one hand, you have Legend of Boggy Creek, a historical reenactment heavy documentary about a Texarkana cryptid that effectively recounts a variety of local myths and legends in an uncritical manner. On the other hand, there’s Haxan, the film I’m covering today, which is not only a very early work in the documentary genre, it’s also a work that is also very critical of historical accounts of witchcraft.
