Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the many mash-ups of the two proliferating under the dreaded confines of pandemic filmgoing (hunkered down, for most, with oneself or…
The Call‘s throwback vibes don’t do much to add to its predictable style and lack of notable scares. Arriving on the heels of the Fear Street films, The Call is another throwback teen horror, but apart from some fun outfits, it takes little inspiration…
Vicious Fun fails as both horror cinema and horror deconstruction. Wes Craven’s Scream has been justly lauded as an epochal moment in horror cinema, a self-reflexive bit of genre deconstruction that has fun tweaking the “rules” of slasher cinema all while still delivering a…
An Unquiet Grave fails to deliver even scares, let alone substantive plot or character. Horror is a genre that tends to thrive on economy; it doesn’t take a big budget to deliver scares, but rather just a concept that lends itself to the creation…
Superdeep is only horrific in how much deadening exposition it forces viewers to endure. The idea that the deepest hole ever drilled into the Earth, the Soviet-made Kola Superdeep Borehole, could be home to unspeakable horrors would seem fertile ground for a scary movie,…
The Amusement Park is a remarkable work and profound reminder of Romero’s facility with pointed critique. Long recognized as one of the absolute masters of horror, the subsumption of George A. Romero’s zombie iconography into the popular lexicon has, perhaps inevitably, gradually sanded off…
Caveat teases potential and boasts an impressive setup, but ultimately loses its thread after this initial stretch. One of the challenges of the modern horror film is creating a plausible enough reason for placing characters in potentially outlandish scenarios. When done successfully, it’s the…
Skull: The Mask indulges in unnecessary table-setting, but once it gets to the good stuff, it’s a throwback, labor-of-love gore fest. There’s a charmingly roughshod, handmade quality to the low budget Skull: The Mask that goes a long way toward papering over its myriad flaws.…
Fried Barry‘s shock tactics wear thin after a while and its stylistic cribbing leaves much to be desired, but it possesses enough ferocity and ambition to keep director Kruger in mind going forward. The opening credits for Fried Barry proudly announce it as “A…
Boys from County Hell boasts a strong premise, but never entirely commits to either its horror or comedy elements. There’s a cairn out in a clearing in Six Mile Hill, and Eugene Moffat (Jack Rowan) and William Bogue (Fra Fee) take tourists out to…
