Austrian creature-feature The Station (titled Blood Glacier elsewhere, which, awesome) tries to emulate the classics of the genre. Its first half is John Carpenter’s The Thing with a dash of Alien, as scientists investigating a remote glacier discover a blood-like substance that infects and transforms anything it comes into contact with into a bloodthirsty mutant,…
You know what you’re getting into when you watch a film with a title like Cheerleader Massacre. Bad acting is par for the course: the actors might look like the Days of Our Lives type, but their thespian ability falls short of even that mark. There’s no reason to be surprised by home-video quality cinematography…
Bad Milo has everything it needs to be a modern cult horror-comedy classic, from an eclectic, impressive cast (Ken Marino, Gillian Jacobs, Kumail Nanjiani, Peter Stormare) to a perfectly silly conceit: a monster living in the rectum of sadsack Duncan (Marino) that emerges in a homicidal rage whenever he’s overcome with stress. Why, then, does…
It’s a rare film that can balance the supernatural and the psychotic. It requires walking the razor’s edge of taut surrealism without toppling into ridiculousness or incoherency. A few films have succeeded – Repulsion, The Innocents, The Shining, Eraserhead. And now, The Babadook. A feature length adaptation of Aussie director Jennifer Kent’s 2005 short Monster,…
Cheap Thrills is an ungainly mashup of grisly horror, blokey comedy and muted morality; it’s like the intersection on the Venn diagram of Jackass and Would You Rather? The conceit is bone-simple: dude (Pat Healy) is down on his luck; fired, broke, family at home. Meets up with an old friend (Ethan Embry) at a…
It’s impossible to deny the iconic importance of James Whale’s Frankenstein. Its appearance is marked by the ornate artificiality, hand-built sets and classical special effects. The oft-parodied restoration of The Monster (Boris Karloff) has lost no potency, channelling the vitality of a theme park ride with its flashing lights, towering set and rickety rollercoaster cart…
They Live is a hodge-podge of sci-fi satire, B-movie maximalism and cheesy humour that spends half its time succeeding on its own merits, and the other half venturing into so-bad-it’s-good territory. The film’s highlights are of a piece with director John Carpenter’s great horror films (Halloween, The Thing), as Nada (Roddy Piper) stumbles onto the…
Two more pieces of writing on other websites to spruik: I found Wolf Creek 2 an interesting film; it’s marketed as a gritty horror film, a successor to its (quite brutal) predecessor, but there’s a lot of intelligence beneath its bloody surface, a satire of Australian xenophobia amongst other things. It’s also a pretty entertaining…
The Marked Ones is the fifth Paranormal Activity film, the latest in a series that’s seemingly unstoppable. The reason for the series’ longevity isn’t complicated; people (especially teenagers) love to be scared. These films are primarily a vehicle for frightening its audience, and The Marked Ones is very much in that tradition. It eschews the…
The full title of this flick is H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond, but if you’re looking for a faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s famous works of gothic fiction, you’re shit out of luck. If you’d prefer a film that combines the demonspawn and bondage of Hellraiser with the grotesque special effects of Reanimator (plus its deliciously campy…
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