This is a little movie that I have been meaning to watch for a while now, and it finally came on one of the movie channels on cable last night, so I took the opportunity to viddie it and found it quite the strange little film. This movie never really had a chance to be a force at the box office. It boasts a no name cast–okay, James Van Der Beek used to be a name–an unknown director and no real backing from a major studio. However, this film does have one thing going for it–Clive Barker.  Read more... (243 words, estimated 58 secs reading time)

I realize that District 9 isn’t technically a horror film, and I may not be staying true to my blog’s genre by reviewing it, but it needs to be done. District 9 is able to instill the type of terror that only the best horror films can. The reason that this movie is so important right now is that horror films are really dropping the ball. In general, the industry is so in love with remakes, CGI, and soulless PG-13 fare that much of the thinking has gone out of the genre. District 9 does for science fiction what Dawn of the Dead did for horror 30+ years ago. Neill Blomkamp has made a truly thought-provoking film with a touch every bit as humanistic as Romero at his greatest.
9 offers more than just the run-of-the-mill social commentary on the differences between humans and the other. Blomkamp shows us that it is only circumstantial and not necessarily necessary that the other be aliens. The film is about society and human nature. By placing the setting in South Africa, it becomes apparent that there really is no bottom in the well of social castes. The aliens take their rightful place in society under the poorest urban dweller, and are forced into lives of scrounging for food and fighting for survival. This race of beings whose technology is far more advanced than our own are reduced to animals when hindered by the social constructs of a slum.
Just like in Romero’s zombie flicks, we are the other. The aliens are us. Blomkamp will show us also that the humans are us as well, unfortunately. I can’t wait until this film is released on Blu-Ray so that I can own it. It is a shining beacon in a fog of crap that is the marquee at this moment in time.

Mikel J. Koven has done something that no one else has. He has written a fairly comprehensive text on the history of Italian giallo films in English. La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film is a great textbook for anyone interested in the subgenre. It offers rudimentary background information to catch up the novice reader while offering commentary on the spectrum of nuances offered in these off-beat films. Koven paves the way for the American gialli fan by charecterizing the subtle differences between gialli, detective fiction, cop films, and horror. Koven is a bit of a purist in that he feels that true gialli involves an amateur detective, rather than an actual policeman, chasing or being chased by a killer. Koven has done his homework, touching on every important work in the subgenre.  Read more... (238 words, 1 image, estimated 57 secs reading time)

While critics loathe it and “good” directors run from it, horror is the most successful of all film genres. Horror has had its ebbs and flows just like anything else. It has seen a rise in trends (slasher films during the 1980s, Hammer monsters, parodies etc.), and it has suffered and languished in times of uninterest in the genre. No matter what, the horror film has always been an honest baromenter of society’s fears. To the many that say this is not so, I offer Halloween /em> to punctuate the end of the sexual revolution. The Omen plays as astute commentary to the Nixon administration and Watergate–the devil’s influence in the White House. But what is horror for today. Horror has always had films produced solely for monetary purposes–Friday the 13th 2-X, as well as most any other franchise spawning many sequels. Horror today, however, is filled with films, producers, and directors who aren’t even original enough to latch on to a new franchise to exploit. Instead, we are constantly inundated by remake after remake. Some remakes need not even be remakes. For example, The new Dawn of the Dead is different enough from its namesake that it could have easily been its own film. The same goes for Rob Zombie’s awful Halloween /em>. The only reason to connect his movie to Carpenter’s is simply for monetary gain.  Read more... (461 words, 1 image, estimated 1:51 mins reading time)