It's like a cruel, twisted Reese's commercial. "You got your stoner comedy in my monster horror!" "You got your monster horror in my stoner comedy!" While these two concepts aren't totally incompatible, the 1999 film Idle Hands doesn't gel them into something as easily consumed by the public as chocolate peanut butter cups.
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I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm not going to be reviewing the film. If you want that, I suggest you go check out Nate Yapp's review of Grindhouse, the double feature experience of which Planet Terror was one part. Instead, I will be reviewing Planet Terror as a DVD release. Why does this film deserve its own DVD review? Well, aside from the fact that the DVD includes 10 minutes of added footage and a noticeable lack of fake trailers, Planet Terror truly shines in a DVD format. Stripped of the big screen experience, the care and skill with which director Robert Rodriguez composed Planet Terror becomes more apparent, and his use of exploitation-esque special effects more ingenious.(read more...)

It’s taken me several years to get around to watching Jack Starrett’s 1975 film Race with the Devil – partly because I had heard that it was a poor man’s The Hills Have Eyes. It’s worth stipulating that Race with the Devil was made a year before Wes Craven’s film and that, if it fails to measure up, it is perhaps because Starrett (like the characters in his film) is on relatively untrodden ground. Race with the Devil is a strange hybrid of genres that doesn’t quite work. Part horror film and par(read more...)

Were a film with a strangely discordant title like Billy the Kid vs. Dracula to be made today, we might expect a sublime and clever comedy with reverent nods to horse operas and horror alike – or at least an honest attempt at such. Unfortunately, the movie that really does bear this title comes from 1966, well before irony had become an established tool in the horror filmmaker arsenal. The genres involved don’t so much mix as poke at each other warily. What laughs there are come unintentionally; what laughs are intended come unintelligibly.(read more...)