Oct 28, 2014
Exclusive Review: EXTRATERRESTRIAL (2014) {0}
It’s midnight in the Podunk town of Echo Lake as a terrified woman bangs on the door of a gas station, begging to use the phone. When the clerk refuses to let her in, she calls 911 from an outside payphone, telling the operator “They took my boys.” Moments later, the phone booth is sucked into the night sky, the woman still inside it – and then crashes back to earth in a splinter of metal and glass.
Oct 28, 2014
Exclusive Review: SEE NO EVIL 2 (2014) {0}
The last time we saw serial killer Jacob Goodnight, in See No Evil (2006), he was as dead as his eight victims: he’d had a pipe stuck in his eye socket (a neat parallel to his own modus operandi, putting out the eyes of his victims), been pushed out of a window, fallen through a glass roof, his heart pierced by a broken rib. To add insult to injury, a dog urinated in his empty eye socket. Of course, you can’t keep a good serial killer down, and after eight years Goodnight is back, alive and killing, in See No Evil 2. Normally, this would be of little interest to anyone other than WWE wrestling fans (Goodnight is played by wrestler Glenn ‘Kane’ Jacobs), and direct-to-DVD horror sequel completists… but the fact that See No Evil 2 is directed by Jane and Sylvia Soska (American Mary, The ABCs of Death 2) makes it automatically worth a look – exactly, one assumes, what the producers had in mind when they hired them.
Oct 28, 2014
Exclusive Review: BIG DRIVER (2014) {0}
“You know you’re no longer at the cutting edge of horror when the Lifetime network starts adapting your stories” would be a facetious way to start a review of Big Driver, Lifetime’s TV movie adaptation of the novella from Stephen King’s 2010 collection “Full Dark, No Stars”. In fact, the TV network aimed at women would have been an ideal home for a number of female-oriented Stephen King adaptations, from Rose Madder to Rose Red, via Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game.
Oct 28, 2014
Exclusive Review: HORNS (2014) {0}
When Iggy Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe) promised to love his girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple) for the rest of his life, she replied “Just love me for the rest of mine.” That life turned out to be cut tragically short when she was brutally murdered. Iggy himself is the chief suspect: hounded day and night by the local press, publicly blamed by Merrin’s distraught father (David Morse), and suspected even by his own parents (James Remar and Kathleen Quinlan), only his lawyer (Max Minghella), Lee, believes him to be incapable of killing. “You don’t think I’m capable of murder?” Iggy fires back, bitterly. “Just put me in a room with the guy who really killed her.”
Oct 28, 2014
Review: THE DEMON’S ROOK (2014) {0}
If you grew up as a horror film fanatic in the 1980s, you may have run through most of the American slasher flicks and occult thrillers – and then you rented Lucio Fulci’s 1980 cult favourite Zombie, which hopefully led you to all sorts of gore-laden apocalyptic mayhem from Italian splatter-slingers like Umberto Lenzi (Nightmare City), Lamberto Bava (Demons), and Bruno Mattei (Night of the Zombies) – which hopefully led you back to more Lucio Fulci. Anyway that’s sort of what happened to me, and while it’s true that the more refined “giallo” thrillers from directors like Dario Argento seem to get most of the respect these days, lots of horror fans still enjoy those cheap, gory, sometimes awful Italian zombie flicks.
Oct 28, 2014
Review: STEPHEN KING’S A GOOD MARRIAGE (2014) {0}
The news that the next Stephen King adaptation, Big Driver, would be for the Lifetime network shows how times have changed: once upon a time, movie adaptations of King’s films were R-rated horrors too gory or disturbing for the mainstream; now one of his stories would debut on the US network which broadcasts Dance Moms, Wife Swap and Girlfriend Intervention (three titles, three demographics covered)? And here’s another adaptation of one of the four novellas in from King’s 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars, which would sit comfortably on Lifetime nestled between The Witches of East End and Grey’s Anatomy re-runs. A Good Marriage is the first story King himself as adapted for the screen since Pet Sematary 25 years ago. But is it any good?
Oct 28, 2014
Review: LET US PREY (2014) {0}
The arrival of a new Pollyanna McIntosh movie is generally worthy of note among genre fans, mainly because the fantastic Scottish actress seems to have pretty solid taste in horror scripts (Offspring, The Woman, White Settlers, etc.), but also because she’s a fine lead actor… and super pretty to boot. (Full disclosure: Yes, we’ve met. She’s lovely. Sue me.)
Oct 28, 2014
Review: THE REAPER (2014) {0}
These days, it’s easier to sell a low-budget horror film than a thriller with no ‘stars’, so it’s not uncommon to see a thriller repackaged as a horror film in order to give it a chance in the marketplace. That’s almost the case with Reaper, which bears the hallmarks of a horror film but is actually a thriller with horror overtones.
