Posts by Nate Yapp

There's a crappy little 1970s low-budget horror flick called Satan's Children that I saw once on a Something Weird DVD. I didn't think it substantial enough to merit a review at the time -- the 16mm source was damaged and grainy, and the soundtrack was half a second out of sync much of the time. All told, it was the kind of exploitation flick that somebody finds in their attic and wonders what Uncle Joe was up to in '75.(read more...)

Screenwriter James Gunn (Tromeo and Juliet, Dawn of the Dead '04) makes his feature-length directorial debut with Slither, and within the first few minutes, he assuredly shows us he knows how to set the tone for a film. A gigantic meteor hurtles through space, heading for certain disastrous impact with Earth. As it hits our atmosphere, however, it begins to burn up, the layers peeling back. When it finally squelches into the muddy woodlands of sleepy Southern burg Wheelsy, it is as a background joke in a completely different scene. Of course, this being a horror film, the tiny, baseball-sized rock cracks open, promising far more insidious spectacle.(read more...)

"You'll never get rid of me that way, Toddy," the sinister cabman Gray intones to his "friend" Dr. MacFarlane, and we believe him. We have to, as it is Boris Karloff's mellifluent voice that delivers the promise, and director Robert Wise has presented Gray up to this point as someone who could deliver on his sinister assurance even after the television has been shut off.(read more...)

It's a typical scene from a typical horror film: a vampire romances his unwilling victim before finally attacking them, leading to a chase sequence. Except in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, the vampire is gay, the "damsel" is also the ostensible hero (and male), and the chase sequence involves slick floors that cause both pursuer and pursued to slide crazily as they run.

Another director might play up the slapstick of the sequence with exaggerated angles and silly sound effects. Polanski avoids such clichés, pointing his camera as a documentarian would, observing the behavior of comedy in the wild. There is an implicit acknowledgement that, yes, this is humor we're watching, but Polanski refuses to cajole us into accepting it as funny. That is our own decision to make.(read more...)