From The Archives: DRAG ME TO HELL (2009).

  Yet another found-footage exorcism movie has hit big at the box office.  This weekend it was The Devil Inside.  Next weekend, who knows?  Some dork is probably planning one right now.  If folks can shell out hard-earned shekels to see that kind of exploitative junk, they should most certainly feel obligated to watch an underseen horror [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR: 2011 Post-Game Wrap-Up.

So that was a fun experiment.  For me, anyway.  Hope you felt the same. What I’m going to do now is give a master list of all 31 entries, do a little “what I learned”, and then give a few quick recommendations of some things that aren’t movies which I enjoyed during the same month.  [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #31: SOUL SURFER (2011).

For an example of a king in its own genre, there’s no beating Jaws.  Spielberg’s shark-horror movie was so iconic that it scared off almost all potential competitors.  Sure, every once in a while you’ll see a Deep Blue Sea or an Open Water or even a Sharks In Venice, but the field is comparatively [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #30: THE LOST BOYS (1987).

  The Lost Boys is one finely-aged wedge of 1980s cheese. I don’t know what experience a first-time viewer would have with it, but for those of us of a certain age, there’s a fondness. For those of us who were high school comic book geeks, it was one of the first times we were represented on [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #29: THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009).

The 1970s and the 1980s were an unusually fertile period for memorable horror movies, as evidenced by the fact that it’s hard to think of many movies from more recent decades that truly measure up.  I’ve mostly covered movies from those decades so far this month, although I’ve found plenty personally to love in more [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #28: RED STATE (2011).

Red State is the new movie from writer-director Kevin Smith, he who made Clerks and Chasing Amy and many other low-budget comedies over the past decade and a half.  This movie is a major departure for Smith, as it’s a very politically conscious story, made and played like a horror movie.  Seeing as how Kevin [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #27: NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984).

After Night Of The Creeps, Night Of The Comet is the best “Night Of The” movie of the 1980s.  (There were many.)  These are the kind of movies you hope for, every time you venture off the mainstream path looking for something out of the ordinary.  These are the kind of movie there just plain [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #26: CHOPPING MALL (1986).

Some movies can only be watched after midnight.  They shouldn’t be fed, but they can be watched. And they’ll be watched by a very specific kind of personality.  For me, it started sometime in the very early 1990s.  If I wasn’t wearing out my Ghostbusters or Big Trouble In Little China VHS tapes, I was [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #25: HORROR OF DRACULA (1958).

A survey of worldwide horror cinema, even one as haphazard as mine has been, would be incomplete without mention of any Hammer movies, so let’s give them their due: Hammer Film Productions was a British production company whose heyday was the late 1950s to the late 1970s.   The Hammer brand has actually returned recently, [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #24: TROLLHUNTER (2011).

Found-footage movies are nothing new.  Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t begin with The Blair Witch Project, and they sure as hell didn’t begin with Paranormal Activity.  The basic concept is pretty brilliant in its utilitarianism and simplicity – long-lost video or film footage of disturbing events is at last unearthed and screened.  This fictional conceit, [...]