I have to admit that I have a bit of a bias towards haunted house films. Horror is my favorite genre, and for whatever psychological reasons (I suspect it has something to do with my earliest experiences with the genre, and perhaps watching too much Scooby Doo as a kid), there's nothing I like as much as a good haunted house film. House on Haunted Hill is one of the most entertaining, well-made haunted house films I've seen in awhile.(read more...)
Although it suffers a bit for its slight embrace of cliches and consequent predictableness, in the end, Pumpkinhead overcomes this small flaw with style.(read more...)
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...)
I had a chance to read the novel that this film is based on before heading to the theater. My wife and I had seen previews for Valentine for a few months and when we discovered Tom Savage’s novel at Borders, we picked it up. My wife read it first, and couldn’t put it down. In the couple weeks before the film, I finally flinched, worrying that the book might spoil some of the impact of the film. I should have went ahead and read it. Nothing could further spoil this garbage.(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...)
Poltergeist is one of those slightly enigmatic films, chock full o' flaws from many perspectives -- including my own -- that is able to rise above its countless gaffes and play like a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately, it's much easier to point out the problems than it is to say why it works. Part of it may be more generational than due to anything inherent with the film. I first saw Poltergeist in the theater as a fifteen-year-old; many of the people who love this film are close to me in age and saw it during or near its first theatrical run. My wife, on the other hand, a bit older and from a different culture, basically hated the film. To her, there wasn't anything to overcome the flaws.(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...)
Director Robert Wise's The Haunting begins with both guns blazing, so to speak. As a haunted house film, it starts beautifully--Wise lingers on an eerie black and white shot of Hill House while narration tells us the creepy backstory, which is chock full of death--suicides, probable murders, early intimations that some spiritual force intertwined with the house itself killed people, etc.(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...)
Although I desperately try to not look at what anyone else is saying about a film before I write my review--out of a neurotic fear that my opinion will be influenced--I have to use the Internet to look up stats so I can give credit where due and spell the names correctly. While looking up info for Shadow of the Vampire, I couldn't help but notice someone boldly proclaiming it "The Best Film of the Year!" While I think that is extremely overstating its case, Shadow of the Vampire is a very good film, but it happens to straddle a few niches while not really committing (or proceeding flawlessly) to any of them, and my impression is that it may not really satisfy most genre fans.(read more...)
