The new Child’s Play works way harder than it needs to. What felt at first like some kind of soulless cash-in on a beloved franchise manages instead to be an inspired update. Imperfect but entertaining, it rebuilds the brand from the inside out, drawing on our increased mistrust of Silicon Valley sociopaths in order to…
Coralie Fargeat’s thrilling bloodbath, Revenge, is one of my favorite movies of the last few years. It felt like an evolution of this particular genre. I remember turning to my wife once it was finished, and her grinned response was simple: “Can we just watch that again?” A rare request if you know her, and…
The Prey (1984) isn’t a movie I would recommend easily. You really need to have spent some time mining the depths of the slasher subgenre to appreciate for this oddity. It’s not unlike any of the “lost” slashers that have made their way to collector’s markets lately (right, The Slayer?). Here, only the most devoted…
Howling III: The Marsupials is a weird and inspired gulp of fresh air. I said it and I mean it. You could watch 400 movies in a year and never see another thing like it. Devoid of any ties to the previous films, you’ve got to hand it to director Philippe Mora for refusing to tread any…
There’s nothing more fascinating to me than the existence of proto-slashers. That is to say, movies made before the “big boom” of stalk-and-slash pictures, where famous elements of the subgenre could be found in narratives that were not otherwise beholden to it. Some proto-slashers are more eerily prescient than others. 1972’s Tower of Evil, for…
For many years, most of them pre-Internet, I lived inside my own bubble where everybody liked Ghostbusters II. I assume that’s because I grew up in a small-ish town where the majority of my friends were equally large Ghostbusters fans of around the same age. I was too young to be aware of the film’s…
When it comes to the significant 3D horror films of the early 1980s, I enjoy them all, and I defend them in exactly the same way: as 35mm funhouse attractions. That’s definitely true when you catch any of the heavy hitters in their native format: Friday the 13th Part III, Amityville 3D and, of course, Jaws…
The shark genre doesn’t have a lot of room for innovation (all due respect to my shark novel coming this month). That’s probably been true since Jaws, but it hasn’t stopped filmmakers from putting their own stamp on one of nature’s fiercest predators. I don’t think anyone would ever claim The Shallows breaks new ground–if you’ve…
One of the downsides that comes with watching thousands upon thousands of horror and exploitation oddities is that the impact of the strangest ones can be lost on veteran eyes. A movie firing on every cylinder, spewing insanity in droves, may not always leave the impression that it should, because in some ways I’ve probably…
The Forest isn’t a great movie. The audience I saw it with last night couldn’t keep quiet for more than five minutes at a time, their behavior regressing to a point where it became necessary (for them) to brainlessly comment on everything happening on screen (“she’s using her phone flashlight!” is a thing that was…