I am grown angry with Amando de Ossorio. Return of the Evil Dead, the second film in the director’s Blind Dead series, isn’t all that good, according to most workable definitions of “good cinema”. But it has atmosphere to spare, and it’s also not all that bad, so I found myself able to overlook some […]

The first semi-surprising thing about Amando de Ossorio’s first sequel to Tombs of the Blind Dead is that it really isn’t a sequel in any of the ways that word is usually meant. It’s certainly not a classic follow-up in that it looks at the same characters in events subsequent to the first movie; nor […]

Let’s briefly review the history of the zombie film, shall we? Sometime in the early 1930s, during the period when American studios were first really playing around in the horror movie sandbox, some smart person stumbled across the Haitian Vodou religion, and particularly a fairly minor component of that tradition, the idea of a sorcerer […]

It may be shamelessly derivative of countless other horror films, it may be the latest in a long run of American remakes of foreign movies deserving of a proper release, and it may be suspiciously timed to feel like nothing but a mercenary knock-off of Cloverfield, but this much about Quarantine certainly shocked me: it […]

As it commonly happens in regards to the Italian horror industry, history is confused on exactly how the fourth “official” Zombi film came to be. The facts are these: Claudio Fragasso had somehow convinced the good folks at Flora Film to put him in charge of a zombie picture right around the same time that […]

The success or failure of any work of art is a result of many factors all interconnecting with each other: luck, talent, money, personality, timing. Which is to say, it’s not very often that you can point to one factor as the reason that e.g. a film was e.g. extraordinarily bad. I bring this up […]

From among the Video Nasties In the fall of 1978, even before it opened in its native United States, George A. Romero’s horror-satire masterpiece Dawn of the Dead was substantially re-edited by Dario Argento for the Italian market, and retitled Zombi; because hey, that’s a good title for a zombie picture, and there hadn’t been […]

Also check out my review of the American cut As most everyone with even a passing interest in horror or indie movies knows, in 1968, young George A. Romero made Night of the Living Dead with the thinnest of budgets and an ungodly amount of creativity, and triggered a seismic event in the genre’s history; […]

There is no doubt in my mind that the most interesting development in cinema right now is the curious explosion of first-person camcorder movies (somebody needs to come up a name for the style soon, but not me). It seems highly unlikely that any of the three films so far made with this aesthetic – […]

A quintessential product of the early 1970s and the characteristic sci-fi of the era, the one thing that you can’t say about 1971’s The Omega Man is that it tries too hard to hew to the book. Except for the central concept – and that only vaguely – this film has essentially nothing in common […]

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. In 2002, two similar movies opened, both looking at the aftereffects of a virus that turns people into unstoppable cannibals, what […]

My hopes were much higher than my expectations concerning 28 Weeks Later, which I figured would be somewhere between “tepid cash-in” and “almost as good as the first one.” On balance, I think it’s not entirely fair to compare this film with 28 Days Later, for they seek to do different things, but if I […]