Posts by Nate Yapp

Roy Ward Baker, who directed several British horror films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, passed away in his sleep on Tuesday, according to Guardian.co.uk. He was 93 years old. Born in 1916, Baker worked his way up the the ranks of the British film industry in the 1930s and 40s, moving from minor jobs to assistant director (he worked with Hitchcock on The Lady Vanishes). In 1947, he made his directorial debut with The October Man, which he made for Two Cities Films in 1947. He directed a number of notable pictures in the 1950s, including Don't Bother to Knock (starring Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe) and A Night to Remember (which documented the sinking of the RMS Titanic). As part of his extensive television work in the early 1960s, Baker helmed the episode of The Avengers which introduced Diana Rigg's Emma Peel to the world. (read more...)

It began, legend says, at Christmas time. Tobe Hooper, a film director whose only feature credit had been a hippie drama called Eggshells, was standing in a Montgomery Ward, trapped by the bustle of last-minute shoppers. As he contemplated how to get through the mass of consumerism, he found violent inspiration in a display of chainsaws. Thankfully, he didn't act on his carnage-filled fantasy of bloody crowd control. Instead, he channeled the idea into his second feature, a low-budget horror flick about a quintet of young people who are beset by a family of cannibal hicks in the sweltering Texas summer. Although produced with working titles such as Headcheese and Leatherface, it was released in 1974 with the only name it would ever need: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This brutal cacophony of terror would go on to spawn three direct sequels, documentaries, a video game, several comic books, an official fan club, and countless pieces of collectible merchandise. Its imitators are innumerable. In 2003, New Line Cinema and Platinum Dunes released a remake which spawned its own prequel, merchandise, and comic books.

Kevin McCarthy, an actor famous for his role in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), died Saturday, September 12, 2010, at the age of 96, according to the New York Times. In Invasion, McCarthy perfectly captured the creeping paranoia of his character, Dr. Miles Bennell, as he discovers that his friends and neighbors are being replaced by emotionless pod people. His wild-eyed cries of "They're here! They're here! You're next!" in the film's prologue are today part of the sci-fi geek patois. In 1978, McCarthy appeared in a cameo in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, yelling the same paranoid warnings. That same year, he appeared in Joe Dante's Piranha, marking the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the actor and director. McCarthy would eventually appear in seven Dante films, the last being 2003's Looney Tunes: Back in Action.(read more...)

I wouldn't usually post about another series of low-budget 80s slasher movies arriving on DVD, but the Slumber Party Massacre series (1982-1990) has always piqued my interest. The slasher movie has long been derided as chauvinist at best, misogynistic at worst, so a trilogy of such films written and directed by women bears closer scrutiny, especially when one of the women involved is noted feminist Rita Mae Brown (she wrote the screenplay for the first Slumber Party Massacre film). (read more...)