Veteran 911 operator Halle Berry is pushed to the breaking point, along with the audience, when she takes The Call. This is the latest thriller from director Brad Anderson who last kept audiences on the edge of their seat with his 2008 tension-inducer, Transsiberrian (though I wasn’t one of them). The Call focuses on Jordan Turner […]
It’s so very hard to elicit real tension and fear in a movie. When it’s done right, it’s a magical thing. I love and crave those moments. I keep going back to it, but The Orphanage is really a perfect ghost story that way. On the other hand, some films spend a lot of time […]
Writer/director Don Coscarelli has a good pedigree and cult following with previous favorites Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep. Those films found a perfect mixture of camp and horror. In an attempt to adapt David Wong’s novel of the same name, Coscarelli has lost his way, his touch or both. Dave (Chase Williamson) meets with skeptical journalist […]
Vampires seemed to be all the rage for a while as far as classic horror movie types. Thanks to The Walking Dead and other successful properties like the novel World War Z and the movie Zombieland, zombies have given the vampires a run for the money. Warm Bodies began life as a 2011 novel from […]
Zombie stories have been the same, more or less, from the dawn of their creation. We know zombies are dead humans infected by some apocalyptic virus leaving them in an undead state doomed to shuffle somewhat aimlessly around collapsing cities and towns forever on the lookout for one thing—brains. It’s mindless existence if it could be called […]
When it comes to horror films I can be as stingy as ole’ Jack O’ Lantern. For me the best horror films need to go beyond the easy fright. They need to crawl beneath the skin and into the deep emotional psyche. That requires a solid, believable story line to go along with the creepy […]
I wasn’t going to see The Cabin in the Woods. Its marketing efforts somehow managed to totally fail with respect to garnering any of my interest. I saw a preview a while back and it looked like another campy, quirky horror/slasher film that would be quickly forgotten. Then a friend of mine from Penn Gamers, […]
Most of us have grown up with Daniel Radcliffe. He’s played Harry Potter in eight films spanning 10 years which would seem one sure way to be typecast. I thought I’d only seen him in those films but a look back shows that I also saw him in 2001’s excellent film, The Tailor of Panama. […]
I decided to check out an American remake of a foreign favorite called Let The Right One In and renamed here to Let Me In. The most accurate single word I can use to describe the movie would absolutely have to be “dark”. Everything about this film is dark, subdued, shadowy, etc. It’s essentially the […]
This past weekend I caught the low-budget chiller Paranormal Activity. The film is shot in what many now call the Blair Witch style—that is it uses unknown actors in basic settings using minimal equipment to tell its story. Unfortunately for me the film wasn’t showing at my favorite theater but instead at the AMC theater […]
Later in the weekend I decided to check out the Korean vampire film that, in English, is called Thirst. The movie is a frustrating one that grabs your attention and then bores you once it has you. It tests your willpower by giving you a stunning visual and following it with another that’s entirely inconceivable […]
The career of Sam Raimi has been filled with films that impress all types of audiences. His big directorial break came in 1981 with the release of The Evil Dead. He solidified his reputation as a horror master with 1992s Army of Darkness—a film so perfectly mixed with horror and comedy that it set itself […]