Disc Type

What in the world am I watching? That was my initial thought at the beginning of Blood, Sweat and Terrors, a film anthology featuring several short films on varying topics. One common element of all the stories is that they all delve into violence during their run. Some with great success, and some that turned out to be so surreal and dark that my wife had to leave the room due to fear of nightmares. Let me tell ya, at one point I considered joining her. To its credit, not all the short films are that deranged, and after a while it was like having my very own film festival in my living room. 
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“It’s alive!”

After nearly 90 years the Universal Horror cycle stands as one of the most enduring collection of horror movies today. Their influence on modern horror is unmistakable. There have been literally thousands of incarnations of Dracula, The Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster, but the first image that comes to your mind will always be the nightmare creations of those Universal films. Studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. was trying to break away from his father’s control and create a studio culture of his own. The results would start in 1931 when an unknown Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi jumped from the stage to the screen in Dracula directed by Tod Browning. Laemmle’s niece, Carla Laemmle, is the girl in the coach headed for Borgo Pass as the film opens to the musical strains from Swan Lake.
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Apollo 18 at one time was meant to be one of several missions NASA had set up that would take astronauts back to the moon.  Due to the fallout from the incident involving Apollo 13 and budget cuts, all the missions were scrapped and focus shifted to the shuttle program.   Conspiracy theories have seemed to always swirl around the Apollo missions, the more famous being about whether or not man ever reached the lunar surface and whether everything we saw about the moon landing was really filmed on a Hollywood soundstage.  The Landing takes things a step further as a faux-documentary about an Apollo 18 launch that resulted in one of NASA’s greatest disasters (that never happened).
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“You are about to witness the strength of snake knowledge.”

That’s me. In addition to being the senior writer here at Upcomingdiscs, I also have been a snake breeder for an even longer period of crimes. So, when a box arrived from our friends at Lionsgate with a rubber snake, a couple of syringe pens, and a movie called Snake Outta Compton, I knew this was one I was going to tackle. The snake in the box was rubber and caused no fright here. The syringe pens on the other hand… Let’s not talk about those. Snake Outta Compton attempts to bring the world of Snakes On A Plane to Straight Outta Compton.
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3^rd Night is one of those films that sneaks up on you.  It’s shot on a low budget, there are no big named actors involved, and it doesn’t have a big studio backing.  It’s the kind of film that seems to be released hoping that by word of mouth or sheer luck, people will stumble upon this film.  You go to your random Wal-Mart or Target and you see these small, independent titles all the time, and I’ve always wondered how many of these are picked up as a cold buy, simply from the customer looking at the cover and reading the box. 3^rd Night is a film that is going to have to go through this struggle, but for those who do decide to pick this up or find it on some other platform, it’ll be a delightful little surprise.  It’s a 71-minute horror fest that is better than you’d expect despite having some strange flaws that left me questioning some of the film’s choices; despite that it still works.
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Over the years there have been attempts to adapt Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting at Hill House, but each attempt seemed to fall short of what the book accomplished. So when Netflix announced that they were going to be attempting to turn the novel into a ten-episode TV series, well, to be honest, it didn’t exactly get me excited. Helming the show is Mike Flanagan, who had some success with Netflix before when directing Gerald’s Game and is currently directing Doctor Sleep, a sequel to Stephen King’s The Shining.  It wasn’t till a couple weeks ago when a came across a trailer for The Haunting of Hill House that I was convinced that perhaps I should give this show a shot.  Once it hit the streaming service and I watched the first episode “Steven Sees a Ghost”, well, I was hooked, and what unfolded over the course of the season resulted in an exceptional television experience.
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