Shadow of the Vampire is a film of many genres. These include… …a historical revisionist re-telling of the filming of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, with John Malkovich playing “Herr Doktor” Murnau; Eddie Izzard playing Gustav von Wangenheim who plays Thomas Hutter; and Willem Dafoe playing a vampire who takes on the role of Max Schreck…
Proxy is two hours of emotional and narrative withholding which combines preposterous thriller and horror movie tropes together into a flat, underwhelming experience. That flatness is almost certainly intentional (it’s hard to imagine any director getting such unemotive performances unintentionally), but it only served to disengage me from the proceedings, blunting the impact of a…
Tusk represents a kind of critical milestone for me, as the first film I found so unpleasant that I walked out of it. Admittedly, it wasn’t entirely Tusk’s foulness (punctuated by a particularly terrible cameo) that sent me from the cinema twenty minutes before its conclusion: the exodus of the group I was sitting with…
Willow Creek seems destined to disappoint hardcore horror fans. This found footage film lacks the grotesque gore or spark of originality that horror fans search for, but that doesn’t necessarily render the film ineffective. The film is constructed from Blair Witch Project blueprints with few departures, as Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) and Jim (Bryce Johnson) head…
Thirst tackles vampirism as a metaphor for primal transgression – forbidden sexual desires and our capacity for violence – a conventional narrative that’s elevated by Park Chan-wook’s stylistic excess (that excess isn’t always appreciated – the runtime didn’t need to stretch past two hours). Song Kang-ho stars as a tormented priest turned vampire after a…
Both Tod Browning and Francis Ford Coppola’s interpretations of Dracula hone in on the heart of the vampiric myth – the commingled fear and allure of eroticism – while reflecting the norms of their time. Browning’s film is mostly remembered for Bela Lugosi’s undeniably iconic (yet profoundly overrated) performance, but there’s surprising little substance to…
Who wouldn’t want to be a vampire? Save the minor inconvenience of hyper-photosensitivity and a rarely quenchable thirst for human blood, you gain the ability to fly, to transform into a bat, and to carry an aura of lascivious sexuality to go with your extended incisors. Not to mention the whole immortality deal, which turns…
I finally watched The Sacrament after watching Ti West’s featurette on the Criterion House release, where he articulately advocated for art-horror films that are “challenging films.” Ti West’s prior films – well, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, anyway – weren’t for everyone, but they were interesting – and, in my book, quality…
There’s no reason Nurse 3-D couldn’t have worked. A bloody mixture of sex-negative horror, nurse sexploitation and American Psycho sounds like it should be an interesting mess. Instead Nurse 3-D is just bloody terrible, a Frankenstein’s monster lurching awkwardly through the detritus of better B-movies, assembling the occasional “so-bad-it’s-good” moment within its remarkably tedious eighty-four…
A great “video nasty” breaches the boundaries of good taste, finding something uncomfortably real behind them. Many video nasties lose their impact over time as censorship slackens, but that’s not the case with Maniac. This is thanks to Joe Spinell’s sweaty anti-charisma as the titular maniac, Frank Zito, combined with Tom Savini’s legendary makeup work (he’s…
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