There are enough reasons to like The Woman in Black and virtually no reasons to love it; but the one that got me the most is its awareness of history. The fourth feature film released by the newly-resuscitated Hammer Films, and only the second to get an actual push, after the 2010 revisionist vampire picture […]

Prior to 1960, American Interntational Pictures – the legendary & notorious AIP -was known almost exclusively as the purveyor of quick, cheap cash-ins, movies that sought to grab the largest possible audience at the smallest possible expense, courtesy of lurid titles, even more lurid posters, and stories that rather more often than not could be […]

It’s to assume based on the terrible ad campaign and the all-telling lack of critics’ screenings that Dream House is a stone-cold stack of shit. The reality is far sadder: it is a completely ineffective and in no particular way incompetent movie that has absolutely no excuse not to be very good. This is, after […]

There was a TV movie made in 1973, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, that is frequently cited by those who’ve seen it, as one of the best made-for-TV movies of that era, one of the two Golden Ages of made-for-TV movies (the other is the early ’50s). I haven’t seen nearly enough of the […]

Every Sunday 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: movies about rattly old houses that may or may not host an assortment of disturbed ghosts or other paranormal […]

Jessica Brown’s delayed pick for a Carry On Campaign review was actually a list of possibilities, of which I made this choice for selfish reasons: I really love the movie and had never come up with a plausible excuse to review it. Which is turning into a bit of a theme with these. Anyway, it’s […]

From among the Video Nasties Thirteen films into the Video Nasties Edition of the Summer of Blood, there’s been a few predominately worthwhile movies here and there, surrounded by movies that are bad enough to be hilariously entertaining and (rather more often) movies that are bad enough to be fucking bad. But all this time, […]

One of the rules by which I select film festival offerings – probably the rule above all others, in fact – is to never see a film that I know is going to open near me within the near future (“near future” = “by the end of December”, for most purposes). But as everyone knows, […]

In The Haunting in Connecticut, we find an example of a phenomenon that I’d expect to be at least a bit more widespread than is the case: it is a motion picture in which nearly every individual element is either tremendously good or completely horrible, with virtually nothing left hanging in the middle ground of […]

I like to think that I am an easily-satisfied viewer of horror films. A concept that’s creepy enough to make the hairs on your neck prickle a bit, good & moody cinematography, imaginative and well-executed gore effects, some iconic imagery, and ideally have the whole thing scary enough that I catch myself thinking about it […]

There’s a peculiar flatness to The Orphanage, sort of a half-finished feeling like everyone involved knew what the Themes and Meanings of the film were supposed to be, but just stubbed it in and saved the hard work for another day. I have absolutely no doubt that the film is “about” the fears of being […]

The world needs more and better scary movies. This is a long-standing and well-known position of mine. This is why I was initially prepared to cut 1408 all the slack it needed, even though it stars John Cusack; generally speaking, the world also needs fewer John Cusack vehicles, which is an equally long-standing although perhaps […]