This film was released roughly seven years after Buttgereit's notorious directorial debut, Nekromantik. I didn't care much for his first offering, mainly because I felt it was a copout. The subject material could have freaked just about any audience, mainstream or not, but it was presented in a way that padded the potential force of its blows. I could almost picture Buttgereit softly elbowing a nearby viewer, winking, and saying "Don't worry, it's not like I'm taking this thing seriously. Loosen up." I was not alone in my assessment. Perhaps he caught drift of these collective opinions, and created this film as a way of proving that he could deliver a pure pharmaceutical-grade story of human perversion. I doubt it, though.(read more...)

Malevolence commits what is, to my mind, the worst sin a film can commit - it's boring. Just competent enough that it's not bad, and just pedantic enough that it will never be any good, Malevolence is a stalk 'n' slash movie that exists in that demilitarized zone of the truly uninteresting.

The opening exhibits a certain minimalist style that is actually quite effective. A boy is forced to watch the murder of a woman by a methodical killer. Writer/director Stevan Mena understands the basic brutality of the scene, and doesn't go in for a lot of additional flash. The creepiness speaks for itself.(read more...)

By 1944, the Universal monsters had become too familiar to be truly frightening. The Frankenstein monster alone had already appeared in five films. Universal's solution was to treat their gaggle of ghouls as old friends. The Frankenstein series evolved into an elaborate excuse to paste as many recognizable faces into a single film as possible. The trend began in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but really blossomed into a cornucopia of creatures with House of Frankenstein.(read more...)