Horror

“Oh hidy ho officer, we've had a doozy of a day. There we were minding our own business, just doing chores around the house, when kids started killing themselves all over my property.”

A carload of preppie college kids set off for a Memorial Day weekend of partying deep in the backwoods of West Virginia. They encounter a couple creepy looking hillbillies leering at them on the highway. Stopping to gas up they encounter the two rednecks again, but this time one of the two approaches the girls holding a scythe over his head and laughing like a madman.

“It's impossible, but it would appear that the Spermupermine has had an adverse effect on your system. It's not only strengthening your spermatozoa, but it's causing it to grow to gargantuan proportions.”

I definitely have a soft spot for the horror anthologies; they’re the equivalent of cinema short stories. Some of the best horror anthology movies were Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, The House That Dripped Blood, Trick ‘R Treat, Asylum, Body Bags, Dead of Night and Black Sabbath.

“Someone's in my fruit cellar! Someone with a fresh soooul!”

Sam Raimi wasn’t really interested in making a horror movie. Weaned on The Three Stooges, comedy was really more his style, but he could only find interested investors if he made a horror movie. So he and his filmmaking partner, Bruce Campbell, made the short film Within the Woods and with it secured funding for their first feature length movie, The Book of the Dead. When it was pointed out kids might not see a movie with book in the title, the name was changed to Evil Dead.

A pirate radio station offers to grant wishes to listeners on full moon nights, but all of said wishes come with grave consequences as it seems that there have been monthly murder/suicides occurring since the radio station's inception.

Over-the-top movies can be enjoyable vehicles to invest ninety minutes into. Movies like Planet Terror where somewhere behind the blood splatter and the lovely Rose McGowan who had a machine gun leg was an actual enjoyable story. But these movies do not just exist in America. Abroad, over in Japan, this type of film has been taken up to the Nth degree by the company Sushi Typhoon. This review covers their newest flic, Helldriver. Let’s see what we got.

“The mind is like a labyrinth in which anyone can get lost.”

The debut film from Mexican director Fernando Barredo Luna, Atrocious is yet another entry into the “found footage” genre. This is a niche where you either enjoy the handheld bouncy ride or you don’t (or if you have motion sickness, you can’t). I, for one, quite like this style of horror. With video cameras in our phones, tablets, computers, cars, and appliances as well as security cameras recording our every move 24 hours a day; the media sources for these stories are endless.

"We have 182 patients. Most are horribly deformed, due to inbreeding and birth defects."

If you’re a horror fan at all, then you have more than a passing familiarity with three of those patients. Back in 2003 we were introduced to Three-Finger, Saw-Tooth and One-Eye in the sleeper horror film Wrong Turn starring Buffy and Angel favorite actress Eliza Dushku in her first staring role, capitalizing on her television fame. She was good in the movie, but our three deformed cannibals were something that we just haven't been able to forget.

“In a blaze of blood, bones, and body parts, the vivacious young girl was instantly reduced to a tossed human salad... a salad that police are still trying to gather up... a salad that was once named Elizabeth.”

Ah, there is nothing that can bring an exploitation movie alive like the unhinged imagination of Frank Henenlotter.

The Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) has made a tidy living preaching the Gospel and working his specialty: exorcisms. But he has lost his faith and, along with it, his willingness to fleece the gullible. He does, however, acknowledge that an exorcism can prove psychologically beneficial if the recipient believes in the ceremony. All that said, Marcus wants out of the business, but he takes on One Last Case, and a film crew tags along with him to the backwoods (where else?), where the devout Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) is convinced that his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) is possessed. Marcus slips into his routine, but soon discovers that there is is much more afoot here than he could have imagined.

“Do you want to paaarrrty!”

If one loves zombies, one loves The Return of the Living Dead. This wonderful, unofficial sequel to Night of the Living Dead seamlessly combined horror and comedy in a way that has rarely been achieved. I would say the only other movie which did that as well was An American Werewolf in London. I had often heard stories in interviews about the insane experience making this movie was, but never knew the whole story. Or should I say stories?