October Horrorshow: House at the End of the Street

House at the End of the StreetThe older I get, the less patience I have for teen movies. I’m turning crotchety. Know what? I prefer the curmudgeonly proprietor of Missile Test to the angsty teen who, once upon a time, would have liked this movie. I welcome the growing gulf between teenagers and myself. But what a conflict this presents. I love horror flicks, and the horror and teen genres exist in a symbiotic relationship that has paid dividends throughout the length and breadth of cinematic history. What to do when I cross paths with a movie like House at the End of the Street, a psychological horror flick that is decidedly youth-oriented. I put on my objective cap and judge the film on its merits, that’s what.

In this film, Jennifer Lawrence and her mom (Elisabeth Shue) move into a house in the swanky part of some town, somewhere (it’s Canada). A few years before, the house next door was the scene of a grisly murder, where a psychotic girl butchered her parents. Welcome to the neighborhood, Jennifer and Jennifer’s mom. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: House at the End of the Street”

October Horrorshow: Pontypool, or, Sydney Briar…is Alive

I’ve seen plenty of bottle episodes in television, but not a lot of bottle movies. Enter Pontypool, a horror film out of Canada from 2008. In this movie, some type of outbreak is ravaging the town of Pontypool, Ontario in the middle of a raging snowstorm. The infected are murderous, making them zombie-like. They shuffle around and infect others, but they’re not after a meal, making these poor people more new-wave infected not-zombies than the traditional Romero undead. Anyway, that is what is going on in the town of Pontypool, but a viewer sees barely any of this, as the movie takes place almost entirely within the confines of a darkened radio studio. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Pontypool, or, Sydney Briar...is Alive”

October Horrorshow: Land of the Dead

Cracked.com recently featured an article about surviving a zombie apocalypse. It concluded that all we know and all we’ve learned about surviving from zombie horror films is wrong. Tactics such as raiding the local gun store and fleeing from cities have become so imprinted on our psyches, Cracked argues, that everyone will have the same ideas, and those ideas will serve to create nothing but the world’s largest smorgasbord for the undead. They have a point. Well, they would, if the danger of a zombie apocalypse were real. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Land of the Dead”