From among the Video Nasties The making and production of The Evil Dead has become a legendary campfire story in its own right: writer-director Sam Raimi, looking to make his first feature, creating a demo short and forcing it upon potential investors; borderline-inhumane working conditions for most of the cash-strapped location shoot; a rapturous, career-making […]
How much easier life would be – or at least, the composition of this essay – if Evil Dead was as consistently bad as it has every reason to be. It is, after all the remake of a truly iconic original, Sam Raimi’s 1981 debut feature, and horror remakes as a class are not terribly […]
One of the important rules, if we are to play fair and maintain our intellectual integrity when dealing with a new movie, is that you should always spot a movie its concept. By which I mean, if you walk into a movie already having issues with the basic idea behind it, that’s just not really […]
If we’re going to make any sense of the RKO B-picture unit headed by producer Val Lewton in the 1940s, we’re going to have to get one fact straight, right now. For all his considerable freedom in making the movies he wanted to make, with very little (though often very critical) oversight from the studio, […]
Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. Typically, we do not want bad movies to have sequels; we want bad movies to go far away and stop ruining […]
Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. I do not suppose that any of my habitual readers were anxious for me to watch and review Resident Evil: Afterlife, […]
It is damned easy for the animation buff to get on a rant about how computer animation came in and destroyed everything, and it seems like we hardly ever get an animated feature done in any either form besides broadly realistic fully-rendered wire-frame CGI, and I know that because I’ve been on that rant. The […]
When it was released, Phantasm II hit a sweet spot where it was not so successful that Universal Pictures was eager to pay for a second sequel; on the other hand, it had managed to scrape up enough business that Universal was interested in distributing such a film, were it to be produced on somebody […]
After White Zombie made a splash in 1932, introducing the very idea of “zombies” to American filmgoers, it would seem like the next logical step would be for a small explosion in zombie pictures. This was the ’30s, after all, when Hollywood was in arguably the most knock-off friendly period in its history. And yet, […]
It has for some time been my custom to celebrate Easter by diving into a zombie movie or four; the problem is that there are precious few important zombie franchises and I’ve already reviewed most of them; also that once you get past the tip-top of the A-list of the subgenre, a disquieting and dispiriting […]
Dayna Christensen used her contribution to the Carry On Campaign to ask me to review “a bad horror movie from the last ten years”. I wish I’d been able to come up with something a bit more imaginative for her, but the harder I tried to come up with anything else, to more I was […]
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, […]
