In the history of cinema, Creature Features are as old as time.
Looking back, we’ve had some pretty intimidating screen monsters throughout the years, icons such as Godzilla and King Kong, the kind of monumental beasts who savaged entire cities, and who even showed themselves capable of emotional depth, resulting in some of film’s most interesting and influential instances of catharsis…
When we talk about cinema’s most underrated monsters, Matt Cordell should be somewhere near the top the list.
Widely known as Maniac Cop, Robert Z’Dar’s Cordell is a brute of a killer, a zombified variation of Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees, with the same superhuman strength and nondiscriminatory appetite for murder. Directed by exploitation junkie William Lustig (Maniac) and written by none other than the sharply satirical Roger Corman (The Stuff), the movie would prove a financial failure at a time when slasher movies had become largely generic and commercially passé…
I have to be honest; this is not what I was expecting at all.
On the surface it is everything you would imagine it to be. It is a movie about chainsaw wielding nutjobs masquerading as barfly hookers. It is grainy filters and sordid, neon-lit streets, a visual scattergun that would leave the likes of Tarantino creaming themselves as buckets of blood and viscera splash against sopping pairs of heaving bosoms. It is B-movie acting, porn star extras, and enough sleaze to leave you slick with delight…
Sometimes a movie comes along that really takes you by surprise.
Brain Damage is much more than just a trashy B-movie horror. It is that – but beneath the one-dimensional characters and schlocky special effects there is a film with a social conscience, a dreamy, often brutal commentary on the pitfalls of drug addiction which far exceeds its budget, displaying visual ingenuity one can’t help but admire…
Whenever we speak fondly of a particular character, what is it that immediately comes to mind?
Sometimes it might be an action or an expression or some other physical detail that sets them apart, but more often than not it will be the words they use and how they use them. Dialogue is everything to a character, because for most of us words are the primary source of communication, and through them we are able to further understand a subject’s personality and motives; we are able to communicate with them on a whole other level…
In 1984 horror maestro Wes Craven unleashed one of the most terrifying characters to ever grace the horror lexicon.
Fred Krueger had all the right ingredients to keep you awake at night. A grotesquely deformed, razor-fingered child-killer, he was not the kind of merciful barbarian who would dispose of you with one brutal blow. This monster was gloriously sadistic, the big kid who had taken pulling legs off spiders to a whole new level.
John Carpenter enjoyed considerable success throughout the late 70s and 80s, working within low budgets and tight schedules to produce unlikely box office hits that contradict their meagre outlay.
Though he is primarily seen as a director of horror movies, his science fiction releases represent some of his strongest work, harking back to the good ol’ days of the 50s with strong political leanings…
The New Blood is a mutilation of a movie, and not as a result of Jason himself, but because of the Motion Picture Association of America, who hacked away the majority of the gore and set out to castrate the franchise forever…
