A while back I was part of the cattle call for what became this article, and just found myself looking this email up as a student was coming to my office to talk about ghosts. So I figured it’d be good if I could see again what I think about them (I know nothing until […]
So what if the rats of NIMH got a taste for human flesh? Or, not flesh, exactly, but I don’t want to give anything away. In the way of hints, though, how about: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark doesn’t not have something to do with Darkness Falls. Where it separates itself, though, is quality.
In Kyle Reese’s bleak future there’s those Heinlein kind of bugs from space but no Ender to xenocide them away, and, I mean, they walk around in Robocop get-up already and look like Super 8 without it and act like first cousins to the aliens in Titan A.E., chasing a ragtag, Walking Dead band of
Oh, Doghouse, where have you been my whole life? I’m not saying I haven’t been into the other zombie comedies, the Shaun of the Deads, the Dead & Breakfasts, all the way back to Hysterical! and the splatter comedy Romero was kickstarting in Dawn of the Dead, and all the way up to Ahh!! Zombies!
I mean — I don’t know. But look: Tin Man was 2007, Fringe debuted 2008 each features someone who grew up in a parallel world (Peter, DG) each features someone who has had ‘knowledge’ surgically removed from their brain (Walter, Glitch) each has a ‘mystic man’ (each played by someone with starpower, too: Nimoy, Dreyfuss)
Sex & Nudity A woman is seen naked, from behind, but it’s through two doors, and in the point-of-view of a killer tire, so it’s not really anything you can do much with. Profanity Not excessive, and what’s there’s mostly from the ‘spectators’—the embedded horror-movie audience meant to offer the same objections we would, or
Or: The subject line that comes to mind now that I just finished up the Deadwood series. Or: just to write dialogue like that once, ever. I mean, yeah, it’s all kinds of fakey and staged and overblown, but it’s that kind of fakey and staged and overblown and David Mamet-y that feels like playwrights
Some movies just make you happy. Feast was this was for me. And Severance. And Leslie Vernon. And, though it’s more over-the-top, Club Dread. Horror comedy’s where it’s at, I think, though there’s a line, yeah; while I’ll sign up any day of the week for a Decampitated viewing, I don’t do so well at
Adolescence and lycanthropy are the chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. All this strange body hair, an insatiable appetite, late hours,  sleeping at all the wrong times, nights you can’t really remember, can only piece together flashes of. A pretty sincere distrust of what are seeming to be your instincts, and everybody looking
“Based on a melody once whistled by Garth Marenghi.” Another movie A book A true story Real events An amusement park ride A video game A television show A toy A real idea A comic book A comic strip A song
Sucker Punch has problems, yes. Usually, though, you can squint just right, only watch the parts of the movie that the trailer sold you on, and you’re good. Not this time. Which, this is a hyperkinetic, Scott Pilgrim-kind of fantasy fight movie involving steam-powered zombies, with some pretty cool updates of standard songs going on
These are, I don’t know, between fifty and ninety movie-type reviews I wrote back in 1999 or so. Pretty much the exact same few months I was first writing DEMON THEORY, yeah. Anyway, I only messed up on a couple. Stigmata‘s one of them, I think. But I got a couple right as well, maybe:
Couple (of my) lists, one at Dzanc, one at the San Antonio Current. And, yeah, for each, I had to check, make sure Sorority Row hadn’t come out in 2010. Not that it for-sure could have edged close to Machete. But definitely maybe.
Of course it’s way after the fact for me to be writing about Piranha 3D, but if I do it later then it’ll even be more after the fact, so . . . Remember when Lou Diamond Phillips was in Bats, way back in 99 or so? An interview he did around then, he kind
SAW 3D status-sized review: best installment in the series in a while, now. Story’s tangled, sure, but not AS tangled. 3D’s fun, but not MY BLOODY VALENTINE fun. Gore’s over the top, Rube Goldberg’s working overtime from the grave, Jigsaw’s forever, but, all that aside, I’m finally getting a sense of this franchise: it’s caper
So, I saw that Paul Tremblay and Jesse Bullington threw down the seventy-four movie gloves, so I made up a list last Wednesday, then promptly blasted off for Minnesota without posting it, only just now remembered, thanks to Travis Hedge Coke’s list of ten. Also, I really wanted to read their lists, but really didn’t
(Fun and Gore, really) Horror movies, for all their excess and transgression, are every bit as rulebound as the romantic comedy. Maybe even moreso. This Night of the Demons remake is no exception. There’s the big rules that have to be followed, like punishing the stupid: those who think having a Halloween party at the
review up here. and, that big, hammer-axe zombie: coolest ever. want to know its whole story. want a movie about it, really.
I remember, I remember I remember The night Grindhouse opened, I somehow lucked into sitting there at the Alamo Drafthouse, where the cups were special that night, matched the movie somehow, and the trailers, man: Hobo With a Shotgun, Thanksgiving, and Machete. Danny Trejo not just in a bad-ass role, but inhabiting that character. Explosions
In a movie, no matter the genre, you will always become that which you were just pretending to be. So, this charlatan exorcist in The Last Exorcism, exposing exorcisms as fraudulent for a documentary crew, what do you think? In a horror movie, will he finally have to become a real exorcist, or might he
Most directors can do one thing just really, really well. David Lynch, say, he can follow a telephone cord up and up such that you get all caught up in the languorous spiral, and that becomes not just the whole room, but the whole story. Wes Craven, he can rig a chase through a tight
M. Night Shyamalan had his work cut out with The Last Airbender. Not only did he have to run with a different title than the original Nickelodeon series—thanks, James Cameron—but he also had to somehow condense sixty-one episodes (1342 minutes) into something feature length. Or, the trailers didn’t tell us otherwise, anyway, but let me
