Posts by Brandt Sponseller

Prolific Grade-D genre director/writer David Prior’s 1986 schlock-fest, Killer Workout, is a difficult film to rate. That’s because much of the time, it is bad enough to be fun, but about as often, it's just painfully bad. However, it still holds an attraction, not completely unlike gazing in fascination at an animal carcass while hiking, that might interest fans with a quirky taste for bad films.(read more...)

At first I was a bit reluctant to give this one an enthusiastic recommendation. It is a bit cheesy in some ways and peeking at other viewer’s ratings of this film, I seem to be way off target from mainstream horror fans. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that I had no choice. I think Amityville II is a much better film than its precursor, and I think it not only succeeds, but is ingeniously clever, on many different levels. On the other hand, I can see an argument that many of the things I’m about to praise about this film were at best accidental triumphs. Still, I don’t think that really makes it less of a remarkable film.(read more...)

Director Stuart (Cool Hand Luke, The Pope of Greenwich Village) Rosenberg's Amityville Horror certainly isn't a masterpiece, and it's not likely to win over a lot of younger, more superficially-oriented horror fans. There isn't much gore to speak of. There aren't mega-budget special effects. The film isn't edited for the MTV generation--that is, its pace has more in common with Robert Wise's The Haunting (although it isn't quite the stinker that that film is) than Evil Dead. What it does have is a deliberate, gradual descent into a mood that threatens to become eerie, but remains disappointingly inert.(read more...)

I'm sure I've said this before, but at this point in cinematic history, it's very hard to make a Dracula film and do something new with it. You have to admire writer/directors like Patrick Lussier who, along with writer Joel Soisson, makes a valiant attempt at creating a film that acknowledges and pays homage to past Draculas while taking bold new steps that will both not offend or seem ridiculous to the traditionalists and keep the audience who wants to see something fresh and exciting entertained for two hours.(read more...)