Our editor-in-chief Nate Yapp is proud to have contributed to the new book Hidden Horror: A Celebration of 101 Underrated and Overlooked Fright Flicks, edited by Aaron Christensen. Another contributors include Anthony Timpone, B.J. Colangelo, Dave Alexander, Classic-Horror.com's own Robert C. Ring and John W. Bowen. Pick up a copy today from Amazon.com!

Chrissy Derbyshire

Chrissy Derbyshire's picture
Horror Hostess for the 21st Century.
Posts by Chrissy Derbyshire

Review: Army of Darkness (1992)

Army of Darkness poster

Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a great horror film. Not an auspicious start to any review. Let’s take it one step further. Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a horror film at all. It’s a madcap comedy, avec zombies – but don’t expect Shaun of the Dead either. This third and (thus far) final film in the Evil Dead series is an amalgam of Three Stooges and Monty Python style comedy antics and groovy Harryhausen-esque special effects, all squeezed into an Evil Dead plot so thin it looks ready to rupture at any moment.(read more...)

Review: Evil Dead II (1987)

Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn poster

Those ghastly deadites are back, and this time it’s comedy. From the creepy, ghost-train opening it’s hard to discern whether Evil Dead II is really a horror film or not. By the time Ash starts chasing his hand around with a shotgun, it’s pretty evident that the film owes a lot to both comedy and horror. Filmlore tells us that The Evil Dead was so over-the-top that many viewers thought it was a spoof. So when director Sam Raimi decided to make a sequel, it became more of a comedy remake of the original. This would explain Ash’s otherwise perplexing behaviour: returning to the house in which he had, one movie ago, almost been killed by things which were evil and, moreover, dead.(read more...)

Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Nightmare on Elm Street poster

The worst thing you can do before viewing Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is to watch one of its sequels. It isn’t that watching the sequel first spoils the chronological flow of the story. No. It is merely because the sequels are predominately ridiculous trash. This can colour your preconceptions of the original movie which is, in fact, rather good. For A Nightmare on Elm Street is, believe it or not, a horror film. It is (brace yourselves) scary. Unlike the pseudo-scary, pseudo-comic franchise that grew out of it, the original film contains some memorable images, interesting plot twists and (gasp, faint) even a decent-to-good script.(read more...)

Review: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)

Hellraiser 3 poster

We’ve seen one house turned into a young woman’s private Hell. We’ve journeyed with that woman into Hell itself. What’s left, but Hell on Earth?(read more...)

Review: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

Hellbound: Hellraiser II poster

What's so surprising about the Hellraiser franchise (if we may call it such) is that no sequel is a repeat performance of its predecessor. No - forget the parentheses: it should not be placed on the same level as Halloween or Friday the 13th, admirable though these franchises may be. For each film has a fresh hell to offer us. Hellraiser's was restricted to one house: a contained, private hell. Hellraiser II takes us to greater depths, as Hellraiser's dynamic teen heroine Kirsty faces the Cenobites on their own turf.(read more...)