By Tim Murr
My favorite type of science fiction is where it’s basically our real world but with a twist, just one or two things off, like Robocop or The Fly. Dystopian futures and spaceships are fine, but I rarely feel sucked into those worlds in the same way. Alien Nation was one of my favorite films as a kid. It came out in 1988 and I couldn’t wait for it to hit my local video store. Being rated R, I knew there was no chance in hell of my parents taking me to see it in the theater.
By Tim Murr
When it comes to growth industries, nothing touches the prison industrial complex in the United States. 2.2 million Americans rotting away, many I’m sure quite deservedly so, but there has to be something dreadfully wrong when there has been a 500 percent increase in the number of prisoners in the last 30 years.
Episode 40 is up now! Brad, Sean, and Brian tackle VHS classic To All A Goodnight, a Santa Slasher from 1980.
Back in the day I bought just about every VHS I could find and still own a great deal of the ones I’ve purchased through the years. I would stumble across some great films and some not so great ones, but either way I was educating myself thought I didn’t realize it. Honestly, a lot of the films that I didn’t care for back in the day are the ones I fell in love with later on in life. The House Of The Yellow Carpet is one of those films.
There are quite a few slashers out there and among them are some underrated ones. Last month I focused on Hide and Go Shriek for VHS Visions and now I bring you another hidden gem called Iced.
What if I said that Robot Ninja is one of the most important films in the history of cinema? I would be full of shit, but I can tell you that it’s my favorite J.R. Bookwalter film and probably the most fun you could ever have with a title like Robot Ninja.
Girlfriend From Hell might have been released in 1990 but it has the ’80s written all over it. With its ’80s-sounding soundtrack and ridiculous comedic aspects, it falls into place with many other gems from back then but still holds up today.
There is a feeling of satisfaction that many have received when dabbling in horror and falling in love with it. Hide and Go Shriek has a plot that will always give me goosebumps. As soon as you tell me there is a horror film with a group of high school or college students that goes camping, hitchhiking, to a summer camp, a sleepover, the mall, or in this case, a furniture store, I’m completely down. I honestly don’t need to know more than that and I couldn’t care less what the plot is about. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to impress us and we love these types of films.
After Alien came out, we received rip-off after rip-off (mostly all good films, though) and the same thing followed after The Terminator was released. Hell, I’ll admit there were a ton of films from the ’80s that copied others because of the success of Hollywood blockbusters during that time.
After the release of The Hills Have Eyes there were a few films with the same likeness and concept but a different setting. Frankly, I couldn’t care less because most of these films were fantastic. Some of them are still my favorites and that includes the film Blood Tracks. Blood Tracks borrows many of the same elements of The Hills Have Eyes except it is set in the snow and the characters that get slashed to bits are a rock band called Solid Gold (Swedish band Easy Action) and their groupies.
Would you want to see a ’90s supernatural slasher flick with a soundtrack by Anthrax? Well, you’re in luck: it does exist and it is called Pledge Night.