Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 23rd, 2010
"And now I wish to present an entertainment which has given pleasure to many of the crowned heads of Europe. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight for your eyes alone..."
In the 1950's and 1960's Hammer picked up where Universal had left off. They became the studio for the very best in horror films. With names like Lugosi, Karloff and Chaney finally reaching the end of their reign, Hammer offered up the likes of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. They resurrected all of the famous Universal monsters in their own image. Now we had a new cycle of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and The Mummy.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 19th, 2010
Written by Dave Younger
A couple, Alex and Kate (Nicholas Shaw, Zoe Richards), has fallen asleep on the couch watching a movie. Kate wakes up muttering, “Don’t open it.” Someone rings the doorbell. You know they shouldn’t open it. It’s only David (Giles Alderson), a good friend, a little freaked out because he’s just discovered his girlfriend is cheating on him. They agree to let him spend the night. Bad idea. He’s more than a little freaked: he can’t sleep, and he sees monsters. We can’t see the monsters too well, but what we do see is reminiscent of the phantasmagoric creatures on The Outer Limits. We’re mostly aware of them through sound
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 15th, 2010
Six young men and women head off in two cars for a weekend trip in rural France. Along the way, the car with the three guys runs out of gas, fortunately within pushing distance of a filling station. There, our boys inadvisedly pick up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be an escaped psychopath. But no sooner have they started to worry about their new passenger when a mysterious fog and a ghostly vision send them careening off a cliff. Wounded and lost, they find that not only do they have a killer to contend with, but there is something monstrous and huge under the ground that is hunting all of them.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on December 13th, 2010
The Haunting of Sorority Row has one of those titles that, when you first hear it, you immediately make assumptions about. My initial assumption was that the movie might very well feature a house full of hot young girls in various stages of undress, acting all catty between pillow fights and being menaced by a supernatural entity of some kind. And then I looked down to the bottom of the dvd case and noted that this was produced by Lifetime. Wait, I thought, isn’t a horror movie by the Lifetime Network akin to Spike TV producing a Jane Austen film festival?
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on December 9th, 2010
"Nobody thinks of it from the whale's point of you."
I think this is the very first film I've ever seen that was made in Iceland. Of course, Iceland isn't one of those movie-making meccas known throughout the world for their movie magic. The truth is, there haven't been too many films set in Iceland and even fewer shot on location there. Now that Harpoon has come along, I don't expect that is going to change any time soon.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 24th, 2010
The Winners are anything but, being an undistinguished rock band playing to tiny, apathetic audiences in nowhere bars. Their time has not only passed, it never arrived. But just as they seem headed for the scrapheap, their bass player (Jessica Paré) is bitten by a vampire. Though her newly acquired taste for blood is a bit of an inconvenience, leading to some extremely messy murders to clean up, she now mesmerizes audiences, and the band catches fire. Leader Rob Stefaniuk is so desperate to catch a break that he is willing to turn a blind eye to just about anything.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on November 17th, 2010
Written by Diane Tillis
Sociopathic serial killer James Bennett (played by Silas Weir Mitchell of Prison Break) has escaped a maximum security mental hospital after being incarcerated for nine years. Two FBI agents team up with a Federal Marshall to figure out where Bennett is heading next by investigating clues left behind in Bennett’s cell. They also turn to the mental hospital’s director Dr. Green (played by Gail O’Grady of Boston Legal) for insight into Bennett’s mind.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on November 8th, 2010
When Wes Craven delivered his first Nightmare On Elm Street film back in 1984, there wasn't much expectation for the film to do anything but deliver a little profit for the new independent studio New Line Cinema. The film did quite a bit better than that. It made the small studio into a player in the industry with the budget to make mainstream films that would have never been possible if not for Craven's little Nightmare. You could say that The Lord Of The Rings owes its very existence, at least in the form of the Peter Jackson films, to Freddy Krueger.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Michael Durr on November 4th, 2010
For me, I’ve never understood the fascination behind zombies unless it involves Milla Jovovich (See Resident Evil). They are undead, lumber around, make strange noises and have a primal urge to eat brains. So, admittedly I saw Colin in my review pile and mostly shrugged. Another zombie movie, *twirl finger*. However, after reading the back jacket, I realized this one had something more: it was told from the zombie’s point of view.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Archive Authors on October 30th, 2010
Written by Diane Tillis
Lake Placid (1999) was a humorous film which played on our fears of animal attacks. It depicted a gigantic man-eating crocodile living in a lake near a rural town in Maine. The idea of crocodiles in Maine was a creative parallel to the alien-invasion scenario. The humans (park rangers, anthropologists, and wildlife experts) had to defeat the murderous alien (giant crocodile) before it destroyed the world (Maine). This concept continued in two direct-to-DVD films