Category Archives: Horror

Thou Shalt Not Kill: Why The Lost Boys Will Never Grow Old

Featuredby 1 Comment

The mid-80’s was something of a halcyon era for the vampire film.

From Charley Brewster’s neighbour troubles in the Rear Window homage, Fright Night, to Katherine Bigelow’s western-tinged and toothless – in a good way – Near Dark. A number of less-revered, though no less entertaining, films also secured releases, including My Best Friend is a Vampire, starring Robert Sean Leonard (remember him?) and Once Bitten, a film Jim Carrey still dines out on.

Probably […]

Read Article →
Trailers 1 featured

Darkest Before Dawn: The Best Horror Movie Trailers of the 80’s

Featuredby Leave a comment

Question: What do you miss most about those halcyon home video days?

Cover art is something that stands out – it made that oh so joyous experience of choosing your rental all the more joyous. Choice is the second thing that springs to mind. Sometimes you would arrive home on a Saturday evening and be thoroughly disappointed with a movie that promised so much and delivered so little. But that was part of the fun, particularly when you unearthed the kind of gem that you couldn’t wait to rent again […]

Read Article →
Jaws the Revenge featured

It Comes In Waves: Jaws The Revenge – A Tale of Hollywood Folly

Featuredby Leave a comment

When John D. Hancock landed in Rome in the summer of 1977, cowed and bruised by his experience in attempting to turn Jaws 2 into a film apart from the Steven Spielberg original, he could hardly have known that one late-September evening, a decade later, Sid Sheinberg would pick up the telephone and announce his intention to revive the Jaws franchise and make a “quality people picture, not a shark picture.” […]

Read Article →
Video Nasties featured

Scream and Scream Again: A Brief History of Video Nasties.

by 2 Comments

The rape of our children’s minds.

I thought that might get your attention, and although that headline may sound like unrestrained hyperbole from a writer of little restraint, it is actually a snippet from a carefully constructed media campaign designed to criminalise independent filmmakers. I’m talking, of course, about the ‘Video Nasty’ scandal of the 1980’s, a political manoeuvre that would scare working class voters into the Draconian arms of Conservative Thatcherism […]

Read Article →
Raw Force featured

Kung-Fu Cannibals aka Raw Force (1982)

by 2 Comments

Kung-Fu Cannibals is as barmy as its title suggests.

In a nutshell, it is a movie about a group of maniacal monks who kidnap and barbecue big-breasted women, believing that female flesh gives them the power to raise the dead. If this movie sounds somewhat misogynistic, that’s because it is. If we’re not in a whorehouse we’re in a strip joint, and with characters credited with such unabashed names as Drunken Sexpot and Girl in Toilet, feminists need not apply […]

Read Article →

Chopping Mall (1986)

by 2 Comments

Long before Amazon and Facebook turned us all into hermits, shopping malls were our cultural epicentre.

Each weekend teenagers would flock in their legions, hanging out at their favourite arcades or fast food restaurants and marvelling at the colourful array of consumer products that were not yet accessible at the click of a touchpad. Inevitably, these monuments to consumerism became schoolyards away from home, and in an era when Reagan proclaimed that ‘all great change in America begins at the dinner table,’ ghetto blasters and bubblegum could only lead to all out rebellion, right? […]

Read Article →
Absurd featured

Absurd (1981)

by Leave a comment

Joe D’Amato’s Absurd is anything other than its title suggests.

Gaining notoriety as one of the 72 ‘video nasties’ deemed unfit for public consumption, it is a transparent derivative of John Carpenter’s seminal slasher Halloween, leeching off its popularity without quite figuring out what made it so effective in the first place. Far from the agonizingly-paced slice of subtlety it aspires to emulate, the movie is […]

Read Article →