The Crate: Classic actors Hal Holbrook, Fritz Weaver, and the lovely Adrienne Barbeau make this story my second favorite Creepshow short. Weaver and Holbrook are professors at the local college. A crate is found underneath some stairs that is unbelievably old and upon further investigation is holding something living inside. Carnage, blood and laughs follow. Both cheesy and funny in a twisted sort of way, this is a great story.
clean hermetically sealed penthouse. How are they getting in? Where are they coming from? You will have to watch the movie.
Sam Neill's Introduction to American Audiences Was as a Cursed Baby Killer
In the first Omen, a child was born. In the second, he entered puberty. Despite the efforts of not one but two father figures to stab him to death with the sacred daggers of Megiddo, in the third film we finally see Damien grow up into... Sam Neill?
Before you start looking around in the bushes for a velociraptor to appear, keep in mind that in 1981, Neill had just begun his movie career. With only two titles to his credit, the New Zealand film Sleeping Dogs and the Australian film, My Brilliant Career, the actor was still years away from the role on the UK show Reilly, Ace of Spies that would really put him on the map. In fact, Neill won the role of Damien in The Omen III: The Final Conflict precisely because he was an unknown, supposedly beating out Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, and Gene Hackman because director Graham Baker decided that an unfamiliar face would be far more believable.
Continue reading "Sam Neill's Introduction to American Audiences Was as a Cursed Baby Killer" »
Hell Ride Review- A Movie That Could Have Easily Fit Into Tarantino's Grindhouse
It's about time someone made a movie starring Michael Madsen. While he isn't the lead in Hell Ride, he owns this picture the way Elvis Presley owns "Hound Dog." Sure, Big Mama Thornton sang it first, but Elvis is the one who wrestled it to the ground and beat it into submission, much the way that Michael Madsen takes his supporting actor part in this motorcycle flick and turns it into the best thing he's put on film since he played the ear-hating Mr. Blonde in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Madsen is too often cast as the Tough Guy, or the Psychopath, but he's got a gift for comedy, an ability to give giggle-inducing readings to the most straightforward lines (a trait he shares with Christopher Walken), and after years of appearing in Quentin Tarantino movies and Tarantino knock-off movies, he can take the most unwieldy chunks of text and make them seem like they just popped into his head. Playing the Gent in Hell Ride, right-hand man to director/writer Larry Bishop's gang boss, Pistolero, he lights up the screen every time he appears in his '60s, ruffle-front tuxedo, wielding a revolver like it's a laser pointer.
Scott Sigler - What Serial Killers Are Hiding in Plain Sight?
Novelist Scott Sigler's horror column appears every Thursday.
I'm late to the Dexter bandwagon. This light-hearted horror series is heading into its third season on Showtime, and I'm just getting started on the Season One DVDs. I have to say, the concept is awesome: Imagine a child adopted by a cop. This cop sees all the horrors of humanity, and he knows how to spot damaged goods. When the family dog turns up buried in the back yard -- along with the bones of many other neighborhood animals -- the cop realizes that his adopted son is a serial killer in the making. Here's where the premise gets very, very clever: The cop knows pathological behavior, and knows damn well that no matter what he does, eventually the boy will follow an overpowering compulsion to kill. To keep his child safe, the cop teaches the boy how to blend in (and how to kill only those that deserve to be killed). Which got me to thinking: What other serial killers are hiding in plain sight? Perhaps there is a checklist of attributes: Handsome, engaging, funny but with a certain internal blankness that can't be defined. I sense a list coming on...
Continue reading "Scott Sigler - What Serial Killers Are Hiding in Plain Sight?" »
Stacie Ponder - Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer Aren't Just Scream Queens, They're Horror Icons
Blogger Stacie Ponder's horror columns appear every Wednesday.
Can you believe that the glorious grindhouse flick Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is 20 years old? Why, it's almost old enough to purchase alcohol! Most movies we enjoyed in our younger days simply don't hold up under the scrutiny of years passing (I'm looking at you, Caveman), but fear not: Chainsaw has only gotten better. It's a lot funnier and just a smidge more clever than you'd think. If you've never seen this masterpiece of B-movie sleaze, now's the time to do it: A 20th anniversary edition DVD is being released this week, and it's got a "making of" documentary as well as a commentary track from writer/director/sleazemeister Fred Olen Ray, the man behind other such trash classics as Girl With the Sex-Ray Eyes and Scalps.
For the uninitiated, the plot of Chainsaw is little more than a tale told since time immemorial: Private eye Jack Chandler (Jay Richardson) is on the lookout for a young runaway (Linnea Quigley). During his search, he runs afoul of a cult of chainsaw-wielding hookers (including Michelle Bauer as Mercedes), led by the Stranger (Gunnar Hansen). I mean, these kind of movies aren't simply written. Rather, they spring fully-formed in a cloud of glitter from the minds of angels riding unicorns. Sure, Gunnar "Leatherface" Hansen provides some chainsaw cred to the affair, but it's the Wonder Twin powers of Quigley and Bauer that really send the film into the stratosphere of awesome.
Midnight Meat Train's Leslie Bibb Tackles Horror to Explore the Unlikable Side of Herself
That isn't Leslie Bibb's face inside that scary sack-mask -- at least, I hope not. But Bibb does have a part in Trick 'r Treat, director Michael Dougherty's embattled love letter to his favorite holiday. She also starred in the recently unveiled Midnight Meat Train, which has accrued a pile of favorable reviews. So what's a nice girl like Bibb, whose past credits include the teen show Popular and films like Talladega Nights and Iron Man, doing in such gruesome territory? "I think you have to really sit down and start to do that -- to explore the unlikeable side of you," she explains. "In horror movies, there's always the token screaming girl running around, but we wanted to explore who she was, so it became much deeper than that."
Cartoonist Lynda Barry Prefers the Exaggerated Fakery of Older Horror Classics
In sharp contrast to her weekly black-and-white comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek, Lynda Barry's new book What It Is brims with vividly colorful compositions. But as many filmmakers have discovered, making the leap to color isn't as easy as it sounds. "Sometimes color kills everything. I'm not sure how," says Barry. "Maybe because it makes it look too much like the regular world. The black-and-white world seems to exist some place between being and thinking -- kind of the dreaming area." In Barry's world, movies follow a different set of rules. "For horror movies, color is re-assuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness," she says. "The Gorgon would have been scarier to me in black and white when I was eight. The color made it look fake so I could stand to be scared by it. People complain about the snakes looking so lame in that movie, but real snakes would have messed the experience up. Especially because I liked snakes a lot, and them hitting the ground when the Gorgon's head gets chopped off would have made me worry about them."
Can the person who penned the decadently violent Cruddy really be so squeamish? "What's funny is that I did write Cruddy, but if Cruddy were a movie, I couldn't watch it," Barry confesses, adding that the same goes for most modern horror films. "I don't go to the newer ones because they are too scary for me. Part of a horror movie has to be a bit fakey for me to really enjoy it. The new ones are so realistic that they distract me from the ride through the horror. It's like going on a spook house ride but instead of fake-looking monsters suddenly dropping down from the walls, there is someone actually jumping on the people in the cars in front me, sucking out their eyes and and chewing their jawbones off. It sort of wrecks the ride."
Lynda Barry's Top 10 Horror Movies
Continue reading "Cartoonist Lynda Barry Prefers the Exaggerated Fakery of Older Horror Classics " »
Features
Web Stalker - Joan Jett Urges Her Fellow Rocky Horror Fans to Keep an Open Mind
On the official Rocky Horror fansite, reaction to news of the remake ranged from disbelief to rejection.
Horror Power Ranking List - August 11, 2008
This week on the Horror Rankings, we go to bat for Midnight Meat Train, and Mirrors, and take the bat to The Haunting of Molly Hartley, and Hostel Part III.
Hell Ride Review- A Movie That Could Have Easily Fit Into Tarantino's Grindhouse
If you can make it past the first 30 minutes, the picture starts to grow on you like a fungus.
Comments (3)
Add Comments
Read More
0 comments:
Post a Comment