Sometimes a scary movie is a glass-half-full proposition, and sometimes it’s a half-empty one. This was the first thing to pop into my head upon sitting down to review the new “scary kid” flick Orphan, and I guess that’s my brain’s way of saying “It’s half-decent and half-goofy. Midway between surprisingly compelling and predictably familiar. For every good performance, there’s an editing blunder, and for every spark of visual style there’s a screenwriting screw-up that negates some of the better bits.” More

In watching A Perfect Getaway I can’t help but be taken back to 1988, a time in which we received a rather basic and unassuming action thriller from Touchstone (Disney) called Shoot to Kill. In that film, a brutal killer has taken a Pacific Northwest hiking guide hostage, and it’s up to a manly tracker (Tom Berenger) and a seasoned FBI agent (Sidney Poitier) to chase the villain down. Aside from being a well-cast, well-paced, and rather picturesque thriller, the flick also has one very cool gimmick; For the first half of the film, we have no idea which “generic hiker” is the killer. Thanks to canny direction by Roger Spottiswoode and a nifty screenplay, the villain of the piece remains hidden among familiar-faced character actors such as Richard Masur, Clancy Brown, Andrew Robinson, and a few others. Shoot to Kill has a darn good time teasing its audience on which bland hiker might be the killer … and the film’s best scene arrives once the baddie comes out in the open. More

“Chaos reigns!” is a now-famous line of dialog (spoken by a wolf) in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, and it certainly seems to sum up the director’s point: Chaos does indeed reign, and no amount of preparation, good intentions, or philanthropy can change that fact. We may try to control our own tiny little corners of the world (and more specifically, the people that happen to populate those little corners) but nothing can stand in the way of decay, degradation, and death. Yeah, so Antichrist isn’t exactly a “fun time” horror film, but with this director, were you expecting anything different? More

Nazi zombies.

That’s all you really need to hear and you know if you want to see Dead Snow or not. I mean … zombies are pretty damn evil all by themselves, but zombies that are also undead minions of Adolf Hitler? You don’t get much more horrible than that. It’s not the plot or the acting or the brilliantly insightful and multi-layered screenplay that you’ll be looking for when you sit down with this nutty Norwegian import, but if you’re down with the concept of flesh-eating SS stormtroopers … then yeah, there’s definitely some fun to be had here. More

Most zombie flicks are actually “about” something. George Romero always finds numerous ways to thread all sorts of sly social commentary throughout his tales of undead mega-carnage, and he’s not the only one: brainy filmmakers have been utilizing the “‘zombie” concept to tell all sorts of subtextual stories: Fido, 28 Days Later, and I Walked With a Zombie have all extracted some interesting ideas in between all the chasing, chewing and chomping, so it’s safe to say that, in many cases, the zombie-style horror flick can be plumbed for some rather smart ideas. More

For those who were worried that filmmaker Sam Raimi had become lost in the wilds of big-budget Hollywood, well, you can rest easy. To those who hold a very special fondness for Mr. Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, his latest film represents a powerfully welcome return to the horror genre — and it’s evident after only 10 minutes of Drag Me to Hell that Raimi still holds a lot of love for the horror genre. Better still, the man is still able to tap into the creepy, the nasty, the violent, and the unpleasant … while always maintaining a wonderfully welcome tongue-in-cheek attitude. More

There are of course at least a dozen different “sub-genres” beneath the glorious heading we all refer to as Horror. Some folks like the monster movies, others dig the slashers, this guy might be a fan of psychological horror, and this gal might be obsessed with all things devil-related. Crazy kids, angry animals, apocalyptic insanity — that’s sort of the beauty of horror films: There are so damn many different types. Today we’re here to discuss a sub-genre that I refer to as “occult thriller that are allegedly and loosely based on actual events, even if that’s just a bunch of marketing BS that’s employed simply to get some butts in the cineplex seats.” You know the ones: The Entity, The Amityville Horror, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, etc. Horror films more interested in having you believe their “factuality” than in anything else, and it’s a sales gimmick that actually seems to work sometimes. Now, obviously I have no idea how much of Peter Cornwell’s The Haunting in Connecticut is based on events that actually occurred, but I can tell you… More

When it comes to remakes, the “horror faithful” can be a prickly lot. Make one like Prom Night and we complain about a lack of faithfulness to the source material, a softening of the chills in the name of a PG-13 rating, and a distressing prevalence of downright suckiness. (Yeah, maybe Prom Night wasn’t a great example to begin with…) But stick too CLOSE to the original film, and we all stand around wondering “What’s the point?” But I’ve always said that the best horror remakes are worth all the crappy ones, and if you focus on the films I’m referring to (let’s say: The Thing, The Fly, Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Hills Have Eyes), then it looks like I might have a point. For every remake that’s “pretty good, not great” (like this year’s renditions of My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th), we’re subjected to a half-dozen that suck with the power of ten collapsed stars. More