Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou follows the titular Mary Lou: she’s burnt alive at her 1957 prom and returns thirty years later to seek vengeance or become prom queen or …something. The ghost story lets the film embrace creepy, surreal imagery as the spirit of murderous Mary Lou possesses virginal Vicky (Wendy Lyon). It’s…
I have a soft spot for ‘80s slasher films. It’s because they remind me of the enticing, illicit possibilities that young adulthood holds when you’re a young teenager. The promise of freedom, fun, forbidden pleasures and, naturally, sex. Paired with temptation is an all-consuming sense of danger, and slasher films generally personify that as some…
Mama has gotten more press than your average horror film, thanks more to its cast than anything else. The film, directed by Argentinean Andrés Muschietti and “presented by” Guillermo del Toro, concerns two young girls found in the woods five years after their disappearance and their foster parents, Kingslayer (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Bin-Laden-slayer (Jessica Chastain).…
Samantha Hughes watches out the window as the elderly couple who’ve hired her to “babysit” their bedridden relative leave, and while she doesn’t say a word, you can see her trepidation in her expression and body language. “It’s only four hours,” you can imagine her thinking. “How bad could it be?” Of course, Samantha doesn’t…
Excision is a bizarre film. I picked it up purely on the basis of its attention-grabbing Blu-Ray cover… …expecting some kind of horror film, probably heavy on the blood and gore. Excision has that, but it’s primarily a black teen comedy, focusing on the struggles of main character Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) to find her own…
I watched Return of the Living Dead Part II hoping for something on par with its gleefully fun predecessor. Let’s see how that worked out, shall we? Original Sequel A cast filled with young adults trying very hard and some genuinely good actors, like Clu Glulager. James Karen, a lot of fun in…
The Devil’s Rejects is Rob Zombie’s sorta-sequel to House of 1000 Corpses. Its concept is genius: take the psychotic, white trash murder-family from the first film and send them out on the road, pursued by police. Sadly, the execution leaves much to be desired. Zombie abandons the attention-deficit style of 1000 Corpses for a more…
Some horror films succeed thanks to a carefully constructed atmosphere of dread, conveyed through a minimalist soundtrack and disconcerting cinematography. Others succeed with nuanced, subtle performances in a bare-bones, unsettling story. House of 1000 Corpses isn’t one of those films. Its cinematography is all over the place: Zombie knows where to place a camera, but…
Return of the Living Dead is the epitome of the B-movie. It’s an honest-to-goodness classic, stuffed with campy humour, cheap yet effective special effects and the first appearance of now-ubiquitous zombie movie tropes like zombies that run rather than shamble and groan “Braaaaains…” It’s full of funny moments: a young punk girl gets involved with…
The early Nightmare on Elm Street films – whether they’re good (one and three) or bad (the rest) – focused on maximalist scares – full of big special effects, buckets of gore and a sneering Freddy centre-frame. In New Nightmare the scares are subtle, building upon real fears – a child’s fear of the boogeyman…
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