It is only in relationship to Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes and The Amityville Curse that what I’m about to say is true in even the most relative sense, but: Amityville 1992: It’s About Time is… not the worst thing? The film (which has since been rebranded without that “1992”, and why not? It didn’t […]

The Amityville Curse wasn’t the worst Amityville film at the time it came out (no haunted lamp, no sale). But it was undoubtedly the most boring, and isn’t that really just as bad? At least Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes lets you gape at it with unreasoning bafflement that numerous intelligent people decided to make […]

For six long years, the Amityville film series rested. And why shouldn’t it? Amityville 3-D was a big fat fucking flop in 1983, and the horror film marketplace started to soften right around the same time. But truly evil things, as we’ve learned from the movies, have a way of forcing themselves back into the […]

In November of the year of our Lord 1983, the holy trinity was completed. That was when the third of the “Part 3-D” movies was released, an increasingly degraded attempt to cash in on the short-lived 3-D fad of the early 1980s before it reached its inevitable end, by slopping some cheap 3-D effects onto […]

Amityville II: The Possession is coated in sleaze, filled with hokey bargain basement haunting effects, and it telegraphs its lack of inspiration on any level other than cashing in on a fad or two for a quick buck so intently, it feels almost like it must be proud of itself. It therefore should come as […]

Here begins the 2017 Summer of Bl the 2017 Summer of Haunted New York Real Estate The thing about The Amityville Horror, the 1979 blockbuster film and the bestselling 1977 book it was based upon alike, is that it’s been solved, quite as thoroughly as any work of narrative fiction can be said to have […]

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, from 1986, is the filmmaking equivalent to being shot in the gut and kicked into a pool of sewage to bleed out. That’s not a pullquote you should hope to see on any future home video releases, but I mean it in the most earnest, admiring way possible. There […]

There aren’t too many slasher films as scattered as Curtains. When I put it that way, it sounds like it’s not even a compliment. And I suppose it probably isn’t a compliment, at that, given how much the movie at the end feels like a collection of scene ideas tacked to a board over the […]

From among the Video Nasties There will never come a time when the career of director Tobe Hooper isn’t sad: the fella makes one timeless all-American cinematic masterpiece in the form of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then never comes within leagues of the same quality ever again. To be frank, most of his post-TCM […]

I’m not sure that Motel Hell “works”, but just on sheer chutzpah, it’s got to be one of the most wholly worthwhile American horror films of the early 1980s. Simply nobody was doing this kind of thing in 1980, the year the film was released as part of the first wave of slasher movies, in […]

A summer at Antagony & Ecstasy without ANY 1980s horror movies is no summer at all. So every weekend in July, I’m looking at a grab-bag of some of the more notable titles released in and around the great slasher boom of 1980-1984. It’s cheap to rag on a movie for not holding fast to […]

If I were to tell you that a movie called Zombeavers is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a 2015 movie (it’s been kicking around since the first half of 2014, but its commercial release was slow in coming), and you were to call me a piece of shit, no good […]