Live on @Twitter: THE APPLE (1980).

  For all the shit that gets talked about Cleopatra, Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar, Howard The Duck, Gigli, Waterworld, and John Carter, 1980′s The Apple is one of the lesser-acknowledged costly debacles in cinematic history.  Coming from the legendary Golan-Globus production team, The Apple is a sci-fi disco musical/ Biblical allegory set in a future America (1994!) [...]

Book Review: THE PASSAGE.

I’m revisiting this piece I wrote on The Passage because the next book in the projected trilogy is due out in a month.  There’s not much chance I’ll re-read the first book before then (it’s long, and besides, I gave my copy to someone else to read), so my summary will have to do.  If [...]

The Top 10 Winter Movies Of All Time.

Cold, cold, cold.  That’s all I hear about, the second the thermometer drops below 40.  But at the moment, all the complaints are pretty valid.  It actually is very cold in New York, 16 degrees worth, as evidenced by the fact that my scrotum is tucking itself up in my grundle.  That’s gross, so it’s a [...]

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 #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 #15: FRIGHT NIGHT (2011).

I’ve never been one to root for the bad guy, but lately, it’s been happening more and more.  It may have something to do with being a life-long Yankee fan and having to get used to Alex Rodriguez.  More likely, it could be the fact that more and more  movies are being made where better, more [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR: DRACULA, by Bram Stoker (1897)..

I once read an interview with the author of Twilight where she proudly claimed to have never read Dracula.  In case you’re wondering why people like myself who are normally more open-minded about junk culture have no respect for the Twilight phenomenon and won’t bother to read the books, this is one very strong reason [...]

31 FLAVORS OF HORROR #3: DRACULA (1931).

Amazingly, and forever to its credit, Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation of Dracula has retained its freshness after eighty years (!) of being used and reused and copied and recycled and parodied. This rendition of the book takes plenty of liberties with Bram Stoker’s source material; it is totally stylized and somewhat messy and is not in [...]

A TRIBUTE: Gene Colan.

Gene Colan, without question one of the greatest comic book artists of all time, died this past Thursday at the age of 84.  He was best known for his early work on Daredevil and Iron Man at Marvel Comics, and also his work on characters like Batman for DC Comics, but more than anything the work [...]

13 Horror Movies Everyone Should See.

Thirteen is just a start. Believe me, there are plenty of horror movies I can happily recommend to you, but I’m going to limit myself to writing about the basics, the barest of necessities. This isn’t even necessarily a list of my own personal favorites, although there is a fair amount of overlap. For the purposes of this article, [...]