Movie Scum

Photo: Universal Pictures In hindsight, it's surprising that it took this long for me to get around to The Frighteners . With Robert Zemeckis and Peter Jackson still in their prime, as well as Michael J. Fox who arguably never left his prime (seriously, check out his arcs on The Good Wife ), I must have just presumed this movie was a stupid comedy with horror-like elements and moved on. Only now have I realized how great this movie actually is.

Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures To be honest, I had chosen this movie primarily because it is a recent film beginning with an 'E' that is easily accessible and I fully expected to hate it. I knew nothing of Escape Room  other than what my almost 14-year-old has told me (she saw it twice in theaters) and the Saw -lite vibes I got from the trailers that I had seen. But shockingly, if not for trying to review random movies over the next two months, I'd probably have never gotten around to this one. But, as it turns out, I would have been missing out.

Photo: Anchor Bay Films "The real monsters were the people we met along the way." - Ancient Proverb (?)

Photo: New World Pictures A repeated line in the trailer for Children of the Corn is "it's an adult nightmare." Creepy kids? Religious cults? Middle of nowhere America, surrounded by corn? Yep, checks out. All nightmare fuel.

Like many of you in my age range, you probably have fond memories of roaming the aisles of the local video store and gazing at all the great VHS covers to try to pick that night's movie. Blood Diner  was definitely one of those films with eye-catching box art that has evaded me for years. I prefer it had stayed that way.

Considering Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem takes no more than fifteen minutes to murder a child by way of an alien chest buster, I was pretty stoked. And shockingly, it mostly held up to my grand expectations for it.

Photo: Orion Pictures 2019's Child’s Play is an odd duck in the remake world. We are all used to the blatant money-grab approach from studios to leverage existing properties for more money (see most of the Platinum Dunes remakes). Occasionally, you’ll even have a long dormant franchise that gets new legs from a big name promising a new take (like the upcoming Candyman or Spiral: From the Book of Saw ).

Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer The early 1990s were not a great time in the horror genre as the big slasher franchises had mostly run their course and the new teenage wave starting with Scream were still a few years away. Arguably, the biggest film to come from this barren time is 1992's Candyman , a smart and socially relevant tale with more heft than your later Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th installments.

Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures Short of the 1930s adaptation of H.G. Well’s novel The Invisible Man, I can’t really think of any other version or variant that is renowned or even good. While Paul Verhoeven ’s Hollow Man takes some interesting approaches, I can’t give it more than mediocre with a few flourishes here and there. Perhaps this week’s The Invisible Man directed by Leigh Whannell can strike a better balance.

Even having seen the VHS cover for Chopping Mall more times than I can count, I never got around to this time capsule of 80s high-concept “horror” movies. No one will confuse Chopping Mall with high-art but it is a solid movie from its era that will make you wonder why they never made Chopping Mall 2 .

For being a zombie movie, Cargo is not so much about zombies as it is making peace with situations that cannot be controlled.

A movie about a killer app? That was the gist of the plot synopsis I read on the Redbox kiosk so I picked it up. I figured it would either be a) really, really bad or b) surprisingly good. In reality, it’s option c, for kind of competent.

Adulthood is scary. An imaginary foe constantly stalking you is even worse.

Well damn if Sinister isn’t a gut punch, even for hardened horror fans like myself. Sinister carries similar traits as other Blumhouse Productions such as Paranormal Activity or Insidious. Blumhouse films tend to be far more suspense than horror, using fear, dread, and general anxiousness over stupid, vapid villains and unearned jumpscares. Sinister , focusing on a true crime author who finds himself way in over his head in horrendous crimes against families follows suit. And it’s probably one of the better horror films to come out this decade. Ethan Hawke is Ellison Oswalt , the aforementioned writer, who is so desperate for a hit that he uproots his family and moves them into a house where the previous occupants were suspended from a hanging tree limb for quite a while. Of course, Oswalt, being the good caregiver he is, declines to tell his family they are living in the murder capital of their quite county. Oswalt stumbles upon a box in his new attic innocuously marked “Hom...

Zombeavers   has no business being as good as it is. Stop me if you’ve heard this premise before. A group of horny co-eds go to an empty cabin in the middle of nowhere and are picked off one-by-one by some gruesome, unstoppable force of nature. Since this basic gist describes the vast majority of horror films produced in the 80s so you’d be forgiven if your appetite wasn’t enthusiastically whetted. However, where before we had masked psychopaths with questionable parental supervision, here we have killer beavers. More specifically zombified killer beavers. It’s fantastic. Co-screenwriter/director Jordan Rubin is clearly well versed in the tropes of the horror films of yore. We have our batch of easily disposable victims, simple and close-minded locals that no one pays attention to, and gloriously cheesy practical effects when the ZOMBEAVERS come knocking (and chewing) at the door. I was reminded of Adam Green’s Hatchet   while watching this as it is an attempt to recre...

This movie demonstrates that family get-togethers can in fact get worse. You’re Next is reminiscent of a lot of other recent films like The Purge or The Strangers with a group of people (a rather large one this time around) trapped in their home, being picked off by villainous folks outside. For their 35th wedding anniversary, Paul and Aubrey invite their four adult kids and their respective significant others to their country house to celebrate. They should have known that was the beginning of their downfall. The film does an excellent job of establishing the characters in the scant minutes available before the carnage begins with some friendly banter between brothers, a nice exchange with the patriarch, and the interrogation of the siblings’ significant others. But all hell breaks loose when cross-bow arrows come flying into the family dinning room as they continue arguing over .... whatever siblings are wont to argue about. This quickly turns the mood from frustratingly hila...

The original Sinister was a kick in the gut as far as horror films go. Having grown up with a steady diet of Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, and whatever other random shlock was out at the time, I typically don't respond well to horror films for their intended purpose: to scare. But I'll be damned if Sinister didn't get me time and time again but not with cheap jump scares and cats in pantries, but with truly disturbing imagery and an unsettling tone throughout. Much like James Wan 's recent non- Saw output, such as The Conjuring or Insidious , I do respond to those low-key but emotionally terrifying scenes that present a real danger to the characters, rather than one composed by lazy screenwriting to justify a horror label. And much like The Conjuring, Sinister was not big on jump-scares or fakeouts but real scenarios playing out to real-ish characters that carried emotional weight. But since Sinister focused on Ethan Hawke and his family, I wonder what directi...

For a movie to combine the fears of old age, Alzheimer's disease, child abduction, and murder must have been a nightmare to pull off. The Taking of Deborah Logan manages all that and more in spades. In honesty, I was perusing Netflix last night, just aimlessly looking but especially focusing on horror movies that may or may not be crap. I almost watched Event Horizon again. But the image and synopsis for Deborah Logan drew me in. Now, after being able to watch it kid-free, I am quite glad I stumbled upon it. At first, I was dismayed at the "found footage" nature of the film. After all, since The Blair Witch Project came out almost two decades ago, almost every other horror movie has used that effect in one way or another. But surprisingly, it works well here. Sarah Logan, tasked with caring after her mother who is showing symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease, is approached by a group of students studying the disease to help and film the progress. Of course, not ...

PG-13 horror movies are nothing new and probably won't be going away anytime soon. Some horror fans bemoan the lack of hard-R stories filled with gore and blood and weighty acts of violence (it seems like the upcoming Evil Dead remake will fill that void though) but the fact is that a good story does much more to elevate a film rather than free reign to shock through gore. The problem though with most PG-13 horror movies, including House at the End of the Street , is a lack of most anything else resembling a horror movie. Like last year's The Possession , this film exists, not as a sobering look at small town prejudices or the foolishness of unmitigated trust, but merely as a way to pander to teenagers looking for something to do on a Friday night. In other words, the mother-daughter pairing of Elisabeth Shue and Jennifer Lawrence is quite nice but there is little else of note on display.

Written by: PBF The Taking , the first feature length film by The BAPrtists ( Lydelle Jackson and Cezil Reed ) is a bold and well crafted horror film. Upon viewing, the time, emotion and care employed to create this film exudes from the screen and forms an impressive entry in to the cinematic universe. We meet Carl ( John Halas ) and Jade ( Alana Jackler ). Carl's fiancé, Carolina ( Linda Rodriguez ) has cheated on him with his best friend. Jade's daughter was murdered by a man ( Frank Bliss ) and was never caught. They have both somehow found themselves tied to trees in the woods. They suffer from bizarre and horrifying visions and are tormented by a family that perform various rituals. Each vision seems to possess them, and leave them bloodier and weaker. They are frequently confronted by the very cause of the rage that may have brought them to the woods; Carolina and the man that killed Jade's daughter. Carl comes to the realization that this is a place to face on...