Posts by Nate Yapp

Before writer-director Adam Green's Hatchet, I couldn't tell you the last time I walked out of a slasher movie smiling like an idiot, or when I last said, "That is so cool!" during an expertly realized gore scene. I have never wanted to hug a director before, but I want to give Green a big bear hug now. Plainly stated, seeing Hatchet was the most fun I’d had with a slasher flick in a long time.

Critically, of course, "fun" is hard to quantify. You can go on the world's biggest roller coaster and then go gibbering to your friends about the time where "the coaster went around this freaky bend" and then "it went upside down twice," and come off sounding like a complete spaz. You're describing the motions and not the experience, the plot of your ride and not the joy.(read more...)

With an Oscar-winning director, a two-time Oscar-winner in the title role, and a number of future Oscar winners and nominees in the supporting cast, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's lavish 1941 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde suffers from a surfeit of class. While director Victor Fleming creates a very literary-minded film, he misses the point of making a horror movie, removing much of the sadism and sordidness necessary to make Robert Louis Stevenson's story play well in the cinematic medium. Instead, we're left with something that's pretty, but ultimately hollow.(read more...)

Romano Scavolini's Nightmare (better known under its UK title Nightmare in a Damaged Brain) has a history of controversy and censorship. The video was banned during the "Video Nasty" debacle in Great Britain and remained so until 2005. Additionally, Tom Savini, who is credited with the special effects, has publicly denied that he worked on the film, although there is some evidence to suggest he served as a consultant to effects artist Ed French. Further, the fact that Nightmare has had spotty availability on VHS and no availability on Region 1 DVD has lent the film an air of foreboding mystery. Don't let any preassigned notions about Nightmare deceive you.  While it's a worthy film on several levels, it suffers from Scavolini trying too hard to give the typically juvenile slasher subgenre an adult sensibility. (read more...)

Credits above are only for personnel unique to this episode. For credits relating to "Masters of Horror" as a whole, see the Masters of Horror review gateway.(read more...)