October Horrorshow: Castle Freak

According to the internet, so it must be true, filmmaker Stuart Gordon was in producer Charles Band’s office when he noticed a poster for a film called Castle Freak. There was no film, as yet — just a poster. But, if Gordon wanted the project, Band said, he could have it, as long as the film he made had a castle and a freak in it. It’s a scene straight out of Ed Wood, so who knows how true it is. True or not, Gordon took the idea and ran with it, making a horror film that was…unique. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Castle Freak”

October Horrorshow: The Frighteners

Before he was boring me to tears putting endless hours of Tolkien tales to film, Peter Jackson used to make horror films. Not many, to be sure. Peter Jackson is not a horror filmmaker. He is a filmmaker who has made horror flicks. His most memorable work in the genre was Dead Alive (Braindead for all you worldly purists out there). That film is memorable for being, perhaps, the goriest horror film of all time. It truly was an exercise in bloody excess, impossible to faithfully convey in a posting to a website. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: The Frighteners”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Spice World & Trancers II

I never met a movie I wouldn’t watch.

— Missile Test

I thought I was being clever when I made that little play on the famous Will Rogers quote. I never thought it would get me in trouble, that I would be forced to live up to such whimsy as if it were a true declaration. I was wrong. One of my friends, Michael, over at Daily Exhaust, decided to challenge my integrity and the integrity of Missile Test by throwing out a suggestion for a shitty movie review. Continue readingShitty Movie Sundays: Spice World & Trancers II”

October Horrorshow: Re-Animator

Ah, October. The time of year when the leaves change from their electric, yet uniform, green into the vibrant oranges, reds, and yellows that typify the mind’s eye view of a New England landscape, one full of hills cut by a meandering river, the sky a wonderful azure dotted here and there with the softest of clouds. The air grows crisp and the days begin to grow noticeably shorter, but the oppression that is summer is left quickly behind, only a distant memory in the pleasantness of the changing season. It was the Reverend William Newell who once wrote:

 

Changing, fading, falling, flying,
From homes that gave them birth,
Autumn leaves, in beauty dying,
Seek the mother breast of earth.

Hmm. Makes one think, doesn’t it? I believe it was also Lewis Black who said, back in the far distant days of 1999, “Fall sucks!” Yes, Lewis, yes it does. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Re-Animator”