Curiosity is a killer in The Midnight Meat Train (2008), adapted from the short story by Clive Barker (one of the first he wrote) and directed by Japanese style-bomber Ryuhei Kitamura in his American feature debut. Leon (Bradley Cooper), a street photographer who chases police calls for a living but prefers to document the underbelly […]
Dario Argento takes sole writing credit for his directorial debut but The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italy, 1970) is actually an unofficial adaptation of Fredric Brown’s novel The Screaming Mimi (previously made into a 1958 film) that Argento developed with popular mystery novelist Bryan Edgar Wallace. Wallace wrote a number of gruesome murder mysteries […]
While I’ve not necessarily been a fan of the new flood of found footage-style horror movies, I do appreciate the return to a different approach to scaring audiences in the dark: films about the creepy, the unnerving, the inexplicable, and the unseen. It beats watching another director try to come up with yet another unique […]
Death Line (aka Raw Meat) (1972) – Gary Sherman directs this underrated (and for years largely unseen) British horror film about the last survivor of a literal underground clan (trapped in a subway construction cave in a century before) who emerges from his cave to hunt for food on the London Underground. Yes, it’s a […]
The original Cat People (1942) was made on a low budget for RKO’s B-movie unit, the first in an amazing series of B-horror films from producer Val Lewton that transcended its origins. It’s a masterpiece of mood and psychological ambiguity masquerading as a cheap exploitation knock-off. Cheap it is, but Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur […]
The Stepford Wives meets Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in Get Out (2017), the directorial debut of writer / comedian Jordan Peele, a tricky and successful mix of social satire, modern horror, and savvy commentary on race as experienced by a person of color in a largely white society. Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris Washington, […]
The Host (2006), Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean monster movie hit, is neither a parody, subversion, or revision of the often campy horror movie genre. It stirs a stew of genre conventions, from political commentary to dysfunctional family satire to earnest emotional pathos, into an often thrilling monster movie as indebted to the B-movies of seventies American […]
David Lynch’s long-awaited return to ‘Twin Peak,’ a TV series like no other, comes to Showtime on Sunday, May 21. It reunites almost the entire original cast to carry on the story over 25 years after the final episode left audiences hanging. To prepare for its return, Stream On Demand revisits the original series and […]
When a nerdy 98-pound-weakling health club janitor and all around nebbish (Mark Torgl) takes a dive into a vat of toxic waste, he transforms into the hideously deformed but amazingly buff Toxic Avenger (Mitchell Cohen), a putrid, pure-hearted mutant ogre in a tutu who declares war on polluters, bullies, and any bad guy who dares […]
I’m not sure how I manage to keep my simultaneous fascination with /repulsion for Lars von Trier in balance, but it’s back with a vengeance in Antichrist (2009), a provocation that is at once beautiful and perverse, personal and cynical, and filled with his sour vision of the emotional small-mindedness (small-heartedness?) of the human animal. […]
