“Do you want to meet a ghost?” The meditative and metaphysical horror cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa made him one of the masters of Japanese horror during its amazing cycle of surreal and nightmarish horror films of the 1990s and 2000s, but his films never really crossed over to the general audience in the U.S. His […]
Forget Van Helsing. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974) is the great swashbuckling dispatcher of the bloodsucking undead. Hard-faced Horst Janson is the brooding Kronos, a rangy, sword-wielding soldier who hunts the vampire scourge with his jovial hunchbacked partner, Grost (John Cater) and takes time out from his athletic battles and meditative interludes for a few […]
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) – The legacy of the horror movie sequel was nicely summed up in Scream by Jaime Kennedy’s film geek character: more bodies, more elaborate deaths, more gore. Director Steve Miner (a veteran of two Friday the 13th sequels), star Jamie Lee Curtis, and company took the high road in […]
Before Star Wars: The Force Awakens made him an international star, John Boyega made a name for himself in Attack the Block (2011), an alien invasion movie set in the gang-run projects of South London. While fireworks fill the sky, meteors pelt the streets, unleashing inky-black predators on an unsuspecting gang of teen thugs and […]
Quentin Tarantino’s work-for-hire rewrite of a B-movie script became an instant cult item when Robert Rodriguez took the reins of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, R), a gory south-of-the-border horror tale with a spaghetti western flourish. George Clooney headlines the picture as a charming and deadly bank robber who, along with his a psycho brother […]
Filmmaker Billy Senese plays more upon suggestion and dread than visceral imagery in the low-budget indie horror thriller The Dead Center (2019). Shane Carruth (director and star of the indie science fiction films Primer and Upstream Color) centers the film as a driven psychiatrist in the Emergency Psychiatric Ward of a city hospital who is […]
As fans of the cult comic book Hellblazer will tell you, Keanu Reeves doesn’t look or act much like comic book anti-hero John Constantine in Constantine (2005), the big screen version of the story of the streetwise supernatural hustler. He does, however, cut a memorable figure with his lockjaw resolve and iconic wardrobe, playing the […]
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – The original version of the oft-filmed science fiction horror is still the most insidious alien invasion film ever made. This is an invasion from within. Small town family doctor Kevin McCarthy returns to his small California coastal community from an out-of-town trip to find everything just a bit […]
British genre maven Neil Marshall howled his arrival with his werewolf combat thriller Dog Soldiers, a sly and inspired UK hit that made cult ripples stateside. With The Descent (2005), a nerve wracking, claustrophobic survival thriller about six spelunking women hunted by the creepiest cave dwellers to skitter across a screen, Marshall honed his skills […]
The initial premise of Sunshine (2007) – the sun is dying and mankind has put all hope in a desperate effort to reignite our star with a nuclear payload of galactic dimensions – is more fantasy than science fiction, powered by nonsense physics. An international crew makes the voyage in a magnificent spaceship with a […]
