In 1974, a horror movie came out that forged a divergent path for the entire horror genre to follow and has since been so widely imitated that if you had never watched it before by 2016, you may wonder what the big deal was about it…

OK: Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman. I had my boy Sherman set the Wayback Machine to 1992. He was promptly hacked to death by Michael Myers as we flew past Halloween H20, but I arrived safely for my viewing of Candyman. My interest was piqued when I saw in the credits that the music score…

I never went to camp as a kid. Growing up in Missouri, there was plenty of open space and fresh air right where I lived, and besides that, my folks were never the type to want to ship their kids off for extended periods (also, I was a real sweety pie). After watching Sleepaway Camp,…

How do you make a sequel of a horror movie whose original hinged on keeping the identity of the killer a secret until the end, since once you reveal this, there would be no way to pull that trick off again? By making the deranged killer from the first movie your protagonist in the second…

Released just a year after SCII: Sleepaway Harder, it’s the last in the original trilogy of this franchise and the end of the line with my review of the whole shebang before moving onto gorier pastures. No preamble this time, you know the deal: camp, murder, Angela, yadda yadda yadda, LET’S DO THIS FUCKING THING!…

I enjoy weird films. If it’s cult, obscure, transgressive, shocking, or just plain bizarre, I’ll seek it out and consume it like it’s garmonbozia. But why this sort of fare? I don’t have particularly bizarre habits, behaviors, or even interests (unless you think nerdy obsessions with rhetorical theory…

After the rather salacious business yesterday’s selection traded in, snap back to reality/oh, there goes gravity because it’s a viewing of the horror classic(?) The Ghost of Frankenstein. I’m not very familiar with the original Universal horror film library in general, but since Frankie’s story has…

There’s something very disturbing about the monsters of Hellraiser, and it’s not just their looks (although that aspect of them is terrifying). It’s that they’re so…calm. Almost like they’re bored with the idea of having to rip your soul apart, as if it’s an unwanted detour on their path to the next extreme S&M event…

In the annuls of classic horror movies, there are thousands of b-movie also-rans that never reached the heights of Sleepaway Camp or the Halloween series, and this is one of them. With the success of Halloween in 1978, the American horror market had a glut of similar fare featuring a psychotic child all grown up and out for more murder; this…

OK, so the film begins by panning down from the opening credit moon to a square-looking grocery store (not one of those hip ones that are all the rage these days). Inside the store, we cruise the aisles via shopping cart cam…

The movie begins with a young man that kinda looks like Emilio Estevez in a mansion wandering around. He hears gristly things afoot and grabs a knife from the kitchen as he hears someone chortling somewhere. The ticking of clocks begin to overwhelm the score, and he slides to the floor clutching the knife. Then…

It’s never a good sign when the first frame of a movie starts off with an apology. This one comes from the studio handling the re-release, which states that all of the original film elements for The Final Terror are now lost in the sands of time, and what…

BOOM! RIGHT INTO THE CREDITS with a low, weird organ on the soundtrack, a wild musical sting appears as the title zooms up to the screen: Na na na na na na na, Madman! The credits scroll quickly on the screen…

Roar roar goes the MGM lion, and with a synth-laden power theme, the animated credits begin. I’m thinking of doing some aerobics while this nifty little tune plays, and Flash animation ghouls and goblins float into the title card: With a solid opening credits sequence over with, we CUT TO a car zooming down the…

Bibbidi-bobbidi-BOO! It’s another fucking horror movie recap and live review. Again, I’m going in blind, so buckle up, chuckle nuts: It’s 1979’s Tourist Trap. Ancient Roman-sounding music begins the film, and it right to the goddamn point by rolling credits immediately.

So I spent much of October 2016 watching horror movies and writing glib little reviews about them. It was an exercise in writing that I gave myself (initially much more ambitious than what transpired, but that explanation will come later)…