// Category Archive for: Horror

DVD Review: Emelie

By Tim Murr

It’s mom and dad’s anniversary and they hire a new babysitter to watch their three young children. She comes highly recommended and seems like a sweet, smart girl, but the parents aren’t gone long before she starts to strangely assert herself over the children, guiding them into the darkest night of their brief lives.

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In Case You Missed It: April 24 – 30, 2016—Throwing Shade In The Green Room

By Less Lee Moore

Even Tommy Shelby wants to see more diversity in TV.

Did you know that April 8 is the day in Queer History that all homosexuals were cured? Hahaha, we’re just kidding. It’s actually the day that homosexuality was removed from the DSM.

And speaking of queer folks, here’s an open letter to the TV industry about why we’re so fucking sick of straight white dudes.

In other TV news, Sachin Hingoo bids farewell to Broad City until next season with the hilarious “Jews on a Plane” and Laury Scarbro reveals how all hell breaks loose on Outsiders in the appropriately titled episode, “All Hell.”

May is the month when the long-awaited Season 3 of Peaky Blinders arrives on our TV screens. Did you know David Bowie was a fan of the show? Try to keep your eyes from leaking when you read about what he sent to the show’s lead actor, Cillian Murphy. (Here’s a recent, wonderful, career-spanning interview with Mr. Murphy that includes some lovely photos.)

Everyone is talking about the talking animals in The Jungle Book movie but don’t forget about Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to Blue Ruin, called Green Room. Brian Baker took the plunge and reviewed this ultraviolent, ultra-brilliant film. You might forget about Hardcore Henry after you see it, though, as Tyler Hodg remarks in his review.

Meanwhile, on the home video front, Jeffery X Martin tackles the “bad crazy” with Arrow’s reissue of Niko Mastorakis’s The Zero Boys, Sachin has warm fuzzies over the white foam in the Blu of ‘80s schlock horror The Stuff, and Melissa Bratcher is delighted that Bayou Maharajah, the doc about infamous New Orleans piano player James Booker, is finally available for everyone to see.

Bone Tomahawk was my favorite movie of 2015 but I’ve never seen one entry in Charles Band’s bizarrely legendary Puppet Master series, so imagine my surprise (and delight?) to learn that the director behind Bone Tomahawk is helming the Band-less Puppet Master reboot. Modern Horrors has the deets.

Oh, and if you’ve always wanted to delve into actor Sho Kosugi’s career, The ScreamCast can help with their most recent podcast, “A Show on Sho.”

It’s been just over a week and we’re still trying to come to terms with a world without Prince. Here’s a stupendous 2009 article from the L.A. Times about the side of Prince that most people in the public rarely saw. Then, lighten up with this hilarious YouTube video, a compilation of all the times that Prince threw shade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4k-d88BEsI&feature=youtu.be

We have a ton of new music for you to check out this week: Tim Murr raves over the David Lynch aura of Dark Palms’ Hoxbar Ghost Town and insists that Grindmother’s Age Of Destruction is not a novelty album; Melissa calls The Jayhawks’ Paging Mr. Proust “a record for the ages” and marvels at the depth and breadth of Cherry Red’s latest comp, Another Splash of Colour: New Psychedelia in Britain 1980 – 1985; while X comforts us with the fact that at least Rob Zombie is good at coming up with song and album titles.

Could it be that Ke$ha is finally free? Find out about this and the “boycott Beyonce” movement on Unicorn Booty’s latest installment of NOW HEAR THIS!

Since tomorrow is a Monday (groan!), here is something that might make the day go a bit faster: a list of 11 hilarious and slightly political celebrities that you must follow on Twitter.

Blu-Ray Review: The Stuff

By Sachin Hingoo

All stills courtesy of DVDBeaver

A genuine curiosity, even for B-movies, The Stuff was one of the first horrors I was ever exposed to when it randomly came up on cable one night when I was a kid. Though it may not be scary (a pretty terrible metric for the quality of a horror film anyhow, since everyone is scared by different things) to anyone but althaiophobics, it definitely had a way of getting under my skin. Its singular style and off-beat premise sucked me in almost immediately. It has a much brighter palette and tone than most horrors, and has a charming slapdash quality about it that makes it feel like it’s always just about to go off the rails. Of course, you’ll realize at some point during the film that it was never on rails to begin with.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Zero Boys

By Jeffery X Martin

The Zero Boys is a horror/action movie from 1985 that raises the bar of ineptitude stunningly high. You would have to try with all your might, and maybe someone else’s, to come up with a film this insipid nowadays. It may be a testament to the filmmaking talents of director Nico Mastorakis that a movie as totally brain-dead as The Zero Boys is as entertaining as it is.

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Movie Review: Green Room

By Brian Baker

At one point, during the film Green Room, “Welcome to the meatgrinder” is uttered.

No other phrase can sum up the misadventures of an out-of-town punk quartet—with left-of-the-middle politics—as they take on a last-minute gig at a white supremacist roadhouse outside of Portland, Oregon.

Green Room is director Jeremy Saulnier’s third full-length feature and much like his cult favorite Blue Ruin, it’s a lovely shot of adrenaline directly into the scrotum called fear.

WARNING: SPOILERS

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In Case You Missed It: April 17 – 23, 2016—Goodnight Sweet Prince

By Less Lee Moore

Another week, another beloved and peerless musician has left us. In case you’ve been on some sort of Luddite retreat, you’ve heard the news that Prince has passed away at age 57. There are far too many good articles contemplating his death online to list them all here, but you might enjoy this one, in which I ponder what it means to lose our heroes, “The Beautiful Ones U Always Seem 2 Lose.”

Here are two vastly different new releases you might want to check out: Cherry Red Records has released Tiny Tim: The Complete Singles Collection (1966-1970) about which Hanna writes the following:

Hearing a grown man do a believable Shirley Temple imitation is always a beautiful experience, and “Mickey the Monkey,” a song from the perspective of a monkey in a zoo providing his story to the child listener, seems almost a comment on Tiny Tim’s own position as a novelty performer: “While you’re watching me, I am watching you, too / You’re as funny to me as I am to you.”

On a totally different segment of the musical spectrum is Trágame Tierra, the long-awaited follow up to Big Black Delta’s self-titled debut. Why this record isn’t blowing up I cannot imagine. I’ve seen only two other reviews for it, and one of them is the most ghastly and insulting thing imaginable, on a website whose name rhymes with “Consequence of Sound.” Ignore that crap, and just read about how great this album is.

Unicorn Booty’s got some music news for you on this week’s NOW HEAR THIS, including the Afropunk festival lineup and more.

Game of Thrones fans are gearing up for the new season which starts tomorrow and at Everything Is Scary, Tim Ford discusses the most frightening characters on the show. None of them is Cersei Lannister. If vintage sitcoms are more your speed, you can check out the first two episodes of the TV or GTFO podcast, in which our own Sachin Hingoo teams up with Gary Heather to talk about Perfect Strangers and Hulk Hogan’s Thunder in Paradise.

Laury Scarbro has a lot to chew on after Outsiders’ episode 11, while Carol Borden has a lot to say about Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and more on the Cultural Gutter.

Movies? You want movies? We got ‘em. Well, we have reviews, at least. Dump those copies of Bride of Re-Animator in the trash, but not before picking up Arrow Video’s glorious new reissue, which Tim Ford assures us is the definitive edition. Sachin reviews a couple of Hot Docs movies, the new ten-part film essay from Werner Herzog, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World and the more-horrifying-than-an-actual-horror film Tickled. Women In Hollywood has their always-welcome list of women-centric, directed, and written films for the week, including the fantastic High-Rise, which I’ll be reviewing next week.

Unicorn Booty is the best site you’re not reading, unless of course, you are already reading it, in which case, yay! The excellent “A Trans Person Explains What’s Really Behind Transphobic Bathroom Bills” does exactly what the title suggests, but there is oh so much more good stuff in there. There’s also a rundown of why Harriet Tubman should be on the US $20 bill as well as some huge developments in world LGBT politics.

Oh, and if you’re having trouble sleeping at night, by all means, do not read this creepy assessment of H.P. Lovecraft’s uber-creepy short story “The Festival” by Peter Counter on Everything Is Scary.

Blu-Ray Review: Bride Of Re-Animator

By Tim Murr

The follow up to 1985’s cult classic comedy gorefest Re-Animator, 1989’s Bride of Re-Animator, was a wild and rollicking film, amping up the craziness and gore with comic book flair. Directed by Brian Yuzna (who also directed the next sequel, Beyond Re-Animator) on a very short time frame, Bride picks up several months after the “Miskatonic Massacre” that ended Re-Animator.

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Blu-Ray Review: Death Walks Twice

By Jeffery X Martin

The Death Walks Twice box set from Arrow Films highlights two gialli by director Luciano Ercoli. One is better than the other, but they follow the gialli formula to the letter and are both a lot of fun on a party night where Apples to Apples just won’t cut it.

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Why The Walking Dead Still Has Me Hooked

By Laury Scarbro

I just spent the last 90 minutes watching The Walking Dead‘s Season 6 finale. To say that I am shocked would be a complete understatement. We’ve spent the entirety of the second half of this season awaiting the arrival of the notorious Negan, with hints of who this man is and why we should fear him and fear for our most beloved characters should they come face to face with him. A cliffhanger was not unexpected, but the acting in this episode? Some of the best, most realistic, and visceral I have ever seen from a television show.

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TV Review: The Walking Dead S6 E16, “Last Day On Earth”

By Less Lee Moore

Even if you don’t watch The Walking Dead, the outrage over this season’s finale was impossible to avoid. Flouncing threats of rage-quitting the show, complaints that the show is merely stringing fans along in order to infuriate and insult them, and angry cries that yet another cliffhanger was going to have to tide people over until Season 7 were par for the course throughout social media and pop culture punditry.

But this is Popshifter, and we don’t play those games.

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