Category Archives: Horror

Dead Heat featured

Dead Heat (1988)

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As genre crossovers go, Dead Heat is about as bold and as ridiculous as they come.

By the late 1980s, buddy cop movies were ten to the penny, and for the most part you knew exactly what to expect. Of course, this was a large part of their charm. Movie’s such as the Shane Black penned Lethal Weapon would take the sub-genre to new and still unchallenged heights, a formula that was aped to varying degrees by movies with various production values. This was a genre that gave us Riggs and Murtaugh, Double Team’s Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman and Samurai Cop’s Marshall and Washington, which should provide a microcosm of the scope in quality we’re dealing with […]

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Night of the Living Dead 1990 featured

Redux of the Dead: 1990’s Night of the Living Dead

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There was a time when “remake” wasn’t a dirty word among cinema fans.

This was before the term became synonymous with Hollywood at its most cynical and predatory. Before the mere mention of the r-word caused an outpouring of consternation, bemoaning—and, not without some merit—accusations that the big studios were all out of new ideas, or worse, had simply stopped caring, the scared and belittled remake once had its day in the sun. It was a period when the game plan wasn’t to simply target beloved and finely executed classics such as Robocop, Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street just for their built-in audiences […]

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Phenomena featured

Phenomena (1985)

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There’s something about Dario Argento’s work that seems to transcend time and place.

Some of this has to do with location and setting, as well as an absence of modern cultural trends, but it is mostly due to the director’s visual style, movies such as Inferno and Suspiria sending us spiralling down a rabbit hole of fantastical terror. Along with Goblin’s nerve-shattering accompaniments, those movies work on a purely visceral level. They startle and excite in equal measures, a series of elaborate murders drenched in the grisly palette of deathly expressionism […]

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Jason X featured

Godspeed, Mr Voorhees: The Liberation of Jason X

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So, they finally did it: they sent Jason to outer space.

As preposterous as that sounds, it was perhaps only a matter of time before horror’s most unlikely hero went celestial. The Friday the 13th series had been guilty of some pretty preposterous gimmicks over the years, and after a budget-struck Jason failed to take Manhattan, something drastic was needed to revive a long-waning franchise. New Line Cinema would take that mantle after purchasing the rights from Paramount with a view to eventually pitting Freddy vs Jason, and their first attempt […]

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