From among the Video Nasties The first thing to do is to simply identify the movie I’m about to review, which isn’t easily done. It’s one of those Italian exploitation pictures with such a daunting number of titles that the full list runs well into the teens; but an English-speaker only needs to know that […]
It was once the case – and not too long ago, at that – that a new zombie film from George A. Romero was a seriously exciting and important event in the world of horror cinema. At their one-per-decade pace, his …of the Dead films weren’t just your typical gutmunchers, they were Events, and their […]
Maybe I was easy to please after Necropolis, but Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave didn’t depress me to nearly the same degree. It’s still the second-worst film in the franchise, but only by a little; just a few tweaks and it would be every inch as good as Part II. Which […]
Eight years elapsed between The Return of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead III; it then took a further twelve years before somebody finally worked up the unmerited bravery to take the series out of mothballs for one last bow. It was not, as you could probably guess, worth the wait, although […]
It’s well-known that George A. Romero’s Dead films are works of cultural inquiry: each of them filmed in a different decade (until, that is, Diary of the Dead), each of them taking a hard look a the social mores and movements of the day, bringing them to bear under the light of sometimes gentle, often […]
The Return of the Living Dead was, in its teeny-tiny way, a watershed moment in horror cinema: besides being the first really successful zombie movie made in America in the 1980s, it was also – as near as I can tell – the first of the great modern horror-comedies: preceding Evil Dead II by two […]
By the mid-1980s, the zombie films of George A. Romero had been ripped-off from virtually every imaginable angle, and attached to any number of bastardised “sequels”; this was mostly thanks to the efforts of the Italian horror movie industry, which had produced a truly inspiring number of awful hangers-on to Dawn of the Dead, known […]
I seem to remember somebody once saying something to the effect of, “The only sin an American can commit is to be unlucky”. It sounds sort of Fitzgeraldian, but I’m almost certain it’s not from Fitzgerald. Hell, maybe I made it up. Anyway, I pity poor Kerry Prior, who indeed committed no greater sin in […]
Horror comedies are rarely pure; they inevitably tend to be more horrifying or more comedic, and the nearly-awesome Zombieland unquestionably belongs to the latter group. Which is a difficult place to be. Every zombie movie of the last 40 years already has an uphill battle, of course; each of them must be weighed against the […]
Seven medical students are vacationing over Easter weekend in a remote cabin in the mountainous wilderness outside the small town of Øksfjord, Norway. Anxious to do some drinking, screwing and general goofing-off, they pay little attention to the crazy, creepy local man who comes along at night to warn them of the dangers in those […]
“I want you DEAD!” This arresting tagline appeared underneath the image of a zombie bedecked as Uncle Sam, pointing his decaying finger at the viewer in the manner of those classic armed forces recruitment posters. Additionally, the original run of VHS tapes had a lenticular cover, so that the zombie Uncle Sam morphed into a […]
Precious few film series can sustain a fourth entry. And when there’s already been a constant drop in quality from one movie to the next, it’s pretty much impossible to regard the idea of yet one more go-round with anything but minor dread; perhaps revulsion or dismissal, but not anything positive. Rules being made to […]
