A Horror Film Blog

This is a Troma film. If you don't know what that means, avoid. You won't regret not experiencing the Troma trauma.  If you have encountered Troma before, you know what to expect - terrible script; dire performances (with the exception of Carla Ferrigno [aka Mrs Lou 'Incredible Hulk' Ferrigno] who appears in a spikey cameo); clueless direction (the director would go onto to do script work on some notable films, bizarrely) awful special effects; gratuitous nudity; witless, juvenile humour. This one has the added 'attraction' of a bad metal soundtrack.  Because this is shamelessly piggybacking on the 80s 'Satanic panic' about how Alice Cooper was going to make our children worship Belzebub, or some such.  Basically, a terrible light metal band announce they are going to do a special show at the dead end town of Mill Basin. MILL BASIN!! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?! In spite of never having toured before, they are apparently the biggest thing in the universe and ...

 In his 80s, Dario Argento could be forgiven for not bothering any more, or for having absolutely nothing left to shock or surprise us with.  Glad to report, he still cares a bit, and he can still startle his audiences, though not with the trade mark gore you might expect. His last few efforts - Giallo was described as "a deeply disappointing work from a director who seems to be yellowing with age, his vision progressively jaundicing" and Marc Kermode - perhaps forgetting he was talking about a Dario Argento film - decried it as a "depressingly sleazy shocker."  Marc, sleazy and shocky are what makes a good Argento film. Sleazy, geddit?  Mark? And before that there was The Third Mother , an incoherent (again, an expected trait in any Argento film) banal (very un-Argento quality) conclusion to the sequence started with the mind blowingly lunatic Grand Guignol brilliance of Suspiria . So it comes as a pleasant surprise to encounter Dark Glasses , a likeable late ...

For ardent fans of my musings (I know you are out there) the Evidence of 2013 is a totally different cheapie found footage film to Evidence (2012), previously reviewed on A Horror Film Blog. Though - such are the conventions - or constraints - of the found footage genre they might as well be the same film.  You could argue we could just title most found footage films Evidence and be done with it.  Which would at least save someone having to think up a snazzy new title to make their identikit products stand out.  In case you are not too good at reading between the lines this Evidence is yet another specimen of by the numbers found footage malarkey, similar to 99% of other films in the genre. Which isn't necessarily bad, if you like that sort of thing (I do); but if you don't, there aren't any reasons to watch this. For people that do like FF type films, this is a mix up of shakey-cam and more traditional style film as a bunch of cliched cops try to work out what happened t...

 A frustrating missed opportunity to do something awesome. There are some tropes that never get old, in my humble opinion.  One of the oldest, most over-used yet evergreen is the one about the squad of tough-as-nails  (or, less often smart-as-fuck scientists) who have to investigate a Terribly Mysterious Happening and discover Things Man Was Not Meant To Know that eats their faces before the Plucky Final Guy / Girl blows it up or flushes it into space or whatever.  Love it.  Any film like that is almost guaranteed a sympathetic viewing - and (weirdly) the closer they stick to the template the better they mostly are.  Mostly. Milena Radulović spends almost the entire film looking various sorts of bad ass. Which is what makes Superdeep disappointing.  In theory, it should be among the greatest of such films - it is essentially The Thing and Aliens and a bunch of lesser genre examples ( Leviathan , Ghost Ship , Event Horizon ) stuck into a blender and ...

What, exactly, were Stuart Gordon's claim to be cinema's pre-eminent adaptor of HP Lovecraft? The hideous monster that lurks in the darkness, tormenting the innocent with his depravity.  Image Bauer Hosting His credentials: Reanimator , a witless take on one of Lovecraft's most morbidly (literally) funny stories; Dagon , a blundering rendition of The Shadow over Innsmouth, and a few odds and ends like Castle Freak which owes a few vague ideas to The Outsider;  From Beyond (a lurid 'reimagining' of a  minor story) and a brief, camp rendering of The Dreams In The Witch House - where he added the sex scenes Lovecraft carelessly forgot to include in his original mind bending yarn. This is the only Lovecrafty bit in the film, where monstrous Gorgio comes face to face with ... himself Thing is, none of these films are actually any good, on any level.  Nor are they worthy failures, like the recent The Colour Out of Space .  Stuart Gordon's 'Lovecraft' films a...

An effective but uneven folk horror from the Netherlands, a place not generally associated with unspeakable ancient evil steeped into the soil ... but is the real monster the atrocious dubbing? Sorry to bother you.  We're here to talk about the terrible ancient curse afflicting your bloodline.  Can we com in? Moloch is a mixed bag.  First of all, the dubbing is terrible.  Characters speak without moving their lips and then their lips flap for several seconds after the finish their lines - which are rendered in unemphatic fashion by voice actors who sound bored rather than terrified or annoyed or aroused.  Why, couldn't they have stuck subtitles on?  The set of people who are willing to soldier on in spite of the dire dubbing is identical to the set of people who will read subtitles.  Why degrade their experience by this travesty? But that said ... Beneath this superficial issue is a good film, made in a very small way and with a tight, claustroph...

Derivative, formulaic that often feels like pastiche.  Watchable enough until the monster rears its unconvincing head.  Then all hope (of fear) is lost. It is mostly a coincidence I'm writing this up in the immediate aftermath of Ghost Ship .  There I may have revealed a somewhat erotic fixation on ships, rust and torches and the diligent peruser of this blog (if such a thing exists) might understandably conclude watching Blood vessel - which is on a ship and where torches are used - might be evidence of a further attempt to sate these deviant desires.  I claim innocence, but expect no-one to believe me. "I am making it off this boat alive!"  And he does. (Luckily, it seems, I can say whatever I like here and no-one will ever know, as - other than a weird anomaly with The Sadness readership numbers have not, shall we say, blown the roof off the fucking joint.) Anyway, Blood Vessel .  I found it trawling through the nether regions of Shudder, and admit that ...