Tag: Supernatural Flick

October Horrorshow: In a Violent Nature

At some point, filmmaker Chris Nash had a revelation. Maybe it was in those moments right before sleep takes hold, when the head carnival, against all sense, is at its most raucous. Maybe it happened while watching another movie, or when his mind was drifting away from a banal or uncomfortable conversation. Whenever it was and whatever the situation, Nash must have thought, “What if a Friday the 13th movie were told from Jason’s perspective?”

That simple idea is what drives In a Violent Nature, from earlier this year. At its core it is a classic 1980s slasher flick, but it’s boiled down until there is nothing left but bright white bones. The movie follows Johnny (Ry Barrett), the Jason Voorhees analogue, as he stomps through the woods and kills people. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: In a Violent Nature”

October Horrorshow: Shocker

Wes Craven is one of the giants of horror cinema. With The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, he mastered the art of dread in horror. He seemed less concerned with frightening his viewers than with making them deeply uncomfortable. He lightened up in the 1980s, though, introducing one of horror’s most wisecracking antagonists with Freddy Krueger. That new style of his continued, less effectively, with Shocker, the story of another mass murdering serial killer with personality.

Mitch Pileggi plays Horace Pinker, a ruthless killer terrorizing the fictional California town of Maryville. It seems not a week goes by when there’s a news report of a home invasion where Pinker murders an entire family. One of those is the family of the detective investigating the murders, Lt. Don Parker (veteran That Guy Michael Murphy), and his adult foster son, Jonathan (Peter Berg), a star football player at the local college. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Shocker”

October Horrorshow: Devil Story, aka Il était une fois…le diable

What does a deformed slasher wearing an SS uniform, a black cat and a black horse, a ghost galleon, an Egyptian mummy, and an emotionally troubled young woman have in common? That’s not a joke. If someone out there knows, get in touch and I’ll forward the info to filmmaker Bernard Launois.

That’s more than a little facetious. All the events in Launois’s bizarre horror flick, Devil Story (French: Once upon a time…the devil), do tie together, but in more of a tangle than a knot. Thank goodness this site is more interested in the craft of film rather than interpretive criticism, because trying to unravel the mess that is this film’s story is futile. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Devil Story, aka Il était une fois…le diable”

October Horrorshow: Cemetery Man, aka Dellamorte dellamore

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is drifting through life. No college degree — no high school degree, even. He admits that he’s only ever read two books in his life. One, he didn’t finish, and the other was the phone book. Did he finish that?

A dead end life inevitably leads one to a dead end job. In Francesco’s case, that’s as caretaker for the cemetery in the Italian town of Buffalora. His assistant is Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), a sensitive idiot whose only spoken words are the first syllable of his name, spat out like a child saying, “Nyaa!”

It would be a normal and dull job if all the pair had to do was bury the dead and keep graves clean, but, in Buffalora, the dead have the habit of coming back to life and clawing their way out into the light. So, every night, Francesco and Gnaghi have the unenviable task of smashing the brains of the undead and sticking them back in their graves. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Cemetery Man, aka Dellamorte dellamore”

October Horrorshow: YellowBrickRoad

Ideas are easy. Writing is hard. That’s why there are so many films with fantastic premises that don’t stick the landing. A case in point is YellowBrickRoad, from writing and directing duo Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton. This film has a strong premise. In 1940, all the residents of the small town of Friar, New Hampshire, decided to walk off into the forest one day, never to be seen alive, again. They left behind everything.

Now, in the present, a small group of researchers has decided to follow in the townsfolk’s footsteps, hiking up the same disused trail, in hopes of discovering just what it was that led them to their doom. They’re looking for a scientific explanation, perhaps based in group psychosis, but are also open to the idea that something supernatural was the cause. Perhaps something, some thing, resides in the pure, untouched wilderness, and lured these townsfolk away from hearth and home. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: YellowBrickRoad”

October Horrorshow: Death Row Diner

Shot on video horror flicks can generally be sorted into two camps. One, those made in Hollywood, but outside the studio system; and two, regional cinema. The main difference between the two is that the regional movies, made by filmmakers such as Tim Ritter, J.R. Bookwalter, and the Polonia brothers, are true outsider art, unconcerned with the way things are supposed to be done while making a movie, while those sprouted from the Los Angeles area have things like unionized crew, professional editing, etc. What both of these broad categorizations have in common is that the movies are objectively bad, no matter where they come from. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Death Row Diner”

October Horrorshow: Gargoyles

According to Gargoyles, a TV movie first broadcast on CBS in 1972, the stone gargoyles that grace gothic cathedrals and other structures are artistic interpretations of real beings — soldiers of Satan who appear every 600 years and attempt to take over the world for their evil master. Wouldn’t you know it, the gargoyles are due to appear in New Mexico in 1972, and it’s up to a college professor and his daughter to stop them.

Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) is a successful demonologist. Not in any occult or supernatural sense. Rather, he writes anthropological books on the origins of demonic myths throughout the world. His studies take him to Devil’s Crossing, New Mexico (location work was done in and around the area of Carlsbad Caverns). He’s joined by his daughter, Diana (Jennifer Salt), who enjoys traveling all over the world with him. Their first stop is a lonely roadside attraction run by Uncle Willie (Woodrow Chambliss), who looks like he hasn’t been around a living person in years. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Gargoyles”

October Horrorshow: The Gingerdead Man

It’s hard to fault the pitch behind The Gingerdead Man. Gary Busey plays Millard Findlemeyer, a mass murderer who, after testimony from a survivor of his attack, Sarah Leigh (Robin Sydney), is executed. His mother, a witch, claims his ashes afterwards, and mixes them into some gingerbread spice, which she then delivers in secret to the bakery owned and operated by Sarah. Some blood is inadvertently added to the mix, and when a dough is made and baked into the shape of a gingerbread man, Findlemeyer’s soul comes back to life, possesses the cookie, and goes on a murderous rampage of revenge. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Gingerdead Man”

October Horrorshow: Lockdown Tower, aka La tour

Horror films are more than just about fear. They run the gamut of distressing emotions. Besides fear there is its more frantic cousin, panic. There is also disgust, grief, loneliness, and, of course, dread. Going beyond fear into these other realms of negative emotional experience can do a lot to rob the fun from a horror flick, but they also introduce realism and honesty into stories that, otherwise, have little more depth than a carnival funhouse. Today’s film dips far into a reservoir of hopelessness, so much so that the experience will linger in a viewer’s mind after the credits roll. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Lockdown Tower, aka La tour”

October Horrorshow: When Evil Lurks, aka Cuando acecha la maldad

From writer/director Demián Rugna comes When Evil Lurks, a kind of dystopian tale, wherein the suffocating threat to humanity is not its own devices, but rather demonic possession.

One night, brothers Pedro and Jimi (Ezequiel Rodríguez and Demián Salomón), hear gunshots in the woods near the family farm in rural Argentina. When they investigate the next morning, they find the mutilated remains of a ‘cleaner,’ a person employed by the government to carry out occult executions of ‘rottens,’ or individuals possessed by demons.

Rottens are an ever-present problem in this film’s universe. Apparently, the charlatanism of organized religion was finally too much for the lord, and churches lost their power to battle evil. Now possession is something of an infectious disease that can spread through a community. The cleaner that Pedro and Jimi found in the woods was on the way to kill a rotten in a neighboring farm. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: When Evil Lurks, aka Cuando acecha la maldad”