Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

There is an exact line of descent, and it curls around the spine of the early ’70s Zeitgeist like smoke coiling over a burning log. First there was Rosemary’s Baby, the book, and it got people talking, and then it begat Rosemary’s Baby the movie, and it was an explosive moment. The story of a […]

1968, the bright dividing line between contemporary and classic horror – in the autumn of that year, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead brought terrifyingly explicit violence and gore to the genre and things change forever. But that groundbreaking horror classic was beat to theaters by a few months by a film whose […]

There have been a fair number of reviewers comparing Devil’s Due with Rosemary’s Baby, which is fair on the grounds that none of the glut of “pregnant with Satan’s baby” movies made in the intervening 46 years have penetrated remotely as far into the cultural consciousness; but subgenre is absolutely the only the thing that […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies Michele Soavi only made four horror films in a career that wasn’t very long (he took many years off to care for his unwell son), which surely explains why his profile isn’t higher. There’s no good argument, certainly not one based on those of […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: ghosts in a haunted house, demonic possession, it’s all fair game in The Conjuring, a giddy old ghost story […]

It is not, I gather, the fashion to be very enthusiastic about The Lords of Salem. Of course, it’s not really the fashion to be enthusiastic about horror movies in general, but even in the forgiving, self-selecting world of horror lovers, Rob Zombie’s fifth film has been greeted with more than its share of hostile […]

The Last Exorcism was a ramshackle old thing, with some very clear charms: it had more conceptual integrity than a lot of found-footage horror, and while it was hardly a powerhouse of complex themes, it was a least trying to raise questions rather than just rely on jump cuts and musical stings to keep the […]

There have been few moments that bonded me as permanently to the friends I shared that moment with as the first time I watched the trailer for Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 in college. An epically bad CGI demon, lots of doom-wracked voiceover, a lisping child reading from the Bible, inexplicable action scenes, and best […]

How right it is to celebrate Apocalypse Day, 21 December 2012, with a movie about the grandpappy of all apocalypses, the one that gave us the very word itself. For “apocalypse” does not come from any source referring to widespread destruction, be it in the form of meteors or tidal waves or carnivorous rabbits; it’s […]

Convention tells us that The Seventh Victim, the third of four films produced by Val Lewton’s B-picture unit at RKO in their peak year of 1943, is a horror film; but even by the standards that Lewton had already established, whereby “horror” gets tweaked in some thoroughly unexpected and unrecognisable way, this one doesn’t look […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: as happens so often, the summer movie season wraps up with a dodgy horror picture, The Possession, a rare […]

It can’t really have been five years since we didn’t care about Ghost Rider, can it? Aye, and the sequel that nobody wanted has taken every bit of that long to come out and promptly be ignored by virtually the whole world: and yet here I am, reviewing Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance anyway, because […]