 | 1973The quest to cheat death is a familiar one in horror fiction, and Sir Hugo Cunningham, the protagonist of The Asphyx, belongs to a long tradition of mad and semi-mad scientists driven to unravel the secret to immortality.
Set in the 1870s, The Asphyx details how Sir Hugo (Robert Stephens), a country squire with interests in photography and parapsychology, discovers the film’s titular spirit. In a series of photographs he and his associates have taken of people as they die, he discovers each features a mysterious smudge seemingly not caused by either faulty equipment or... Read More |
 | 2003Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses has nostalgia on its side but not much else. Pretending the last 20 years of teen slasher flicks never existed, Zombie creates a strange burlesque cocktail that reimagines The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by way of Vulgar. Four teenagers go chasing after an urban legend (Doctor Satan) in backwater USA and meet strange with an ex-prom queen (a busty Karen Black) and her immediate family. The kids have to wear masks before they can chow down on Halloween dessert and soon find themselves rubbing shoulders with several... Read More |
 | 2014Let me start off this review by saying that I am not a fan of clowns. I don’t mean that in a “I flip out when I see them, they’re so scary” kind of way. I mean that I think they’re boring and overused. Thanks to Stephen Kings’ Pennywise (from It) and northern Illinois’ John Wayne Gacy, we’ve been inundated with clowns in our horror for the past thirty years, and every time it looks like they’re going away, they’re right back in our faces with the Insane Clown Posse and a flood of unoriginal, over-the-top clowns-as-killers horror films. It’s rare that any movie with clowns... Read More |
 | 2006The above quote opens what could be one of the most disturbing movies I have seen in a long time. Uwe Boll’s Seed is an unflinching exercise in human cruelty. The movie begins with archival footage of humans being exceptionally cruel to a variety of animals that was provided by PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I thought this was unnecessary at the time, but in further watching the movie, I felt that the PETA footage started the story off in the right direction. It prepares the viewer for the cruelty expressed further in. The next scene is a man being... Read More |
 | 1973The year 1973 began and ended with cries of pain. It began with Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers,” and it closed with William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist.” Both films are about the weather of the human soul, and no two films could be more different. Yet each in its own way forces us to look inside, to experience horror, to confront the reality of human suffering. The Bergman film is a humanist classic. The Friedkin film is an exploitation of the most fearsome resources of the cinema. That does not make it evil, but it does not make it noble, either.
The difference, maybe... Read More |
