Tag Archives: Slasher

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Night School (1981)

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What do The Thorn Birds and Night School have in common? Well, one features a crazy religious love conundrum and plenty of praying, while the other features no religion and plenty of preying and a little crazy love, and therein lies the conundrum.

Both star the thinking man’s Kelly LeBrock—Rachel Ward—and the latter is what we’re revisiting in this space. At one point, Night School (UK title: Terror Eyes—get it?) was one of those films that became so hard to find that you might […]

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Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)

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Friday the 13th Part 3 feels about 20 minutes too long, and there is a very specific reason for this.

With the series already becoming tired after only two instalments, Paramount decided to cash-in on the Reagan-era 3-D movie fad, a dismal period which included the likes of Jaws 3-D and the woefully absurd Amityville 3-D, an atrocity which featured some of the shoddiest practical effects ever created live in your living room. 3-D sequels were a sign of desperation for any stale franchise (think Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare), and […]

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Video Nasties # 1: Absurd (1981)

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Back in the early 1980’s, the UK press had a field day damning the content of video cassette tapes dubbed ‘Video Nasties’.

These releases went under the radar of the British Board of Film Classification due to a loophole in distributing laws, and many decried their explicit content, relating them to various real-life crimes and claiming that their influence was responsible for warping the minds of the youth of society […]

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Maniac Cop (1988)

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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 […]

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Pieces 1982

Pieces (1982)

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B-movie slashers – once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, right?

If you’re judging them in terms of originality, then yes, they are all very much the same – particularly those from the early part of the 1980s before censorship hysteria shackled the industry. In regards to technique, they are invariably cheap rip-offs of John Carpenter’s genre-defining Halloween […]

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Intruder 1989

Intruder (1989)

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Intruder is something of an anomaly.

Made at the tail-end of the 1980s, it was released long after the MPAA had stepped in to curtail the wanton bloodlust of the slasher boom, an imposition on civil liberties that would lead to years of the kind of tepid horror that would turn the genre stale. Just as Jason Voorhees was setting sail for Manhattan in perhaps the most censored of an ever-diluting formula […]

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Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

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It took producers a whole year to renege on Friday the 13th’s promise that part IV would indeed be the final chapter, and the $22,000,000 it raked in – more than ten times its allocated budget – tells you exactly why.

Jason was far too big a draw to put to bed in 1984, and you have to believe that the studio was aware of this; in all likelihood, Jason’s demise was nothing more than a cynical marketing gimmick […]

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

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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 […]

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Friday the 13th part VII: The New Blood (1988)

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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.

Because of this the movie is particularly bland. Forget the total lack of dramatic tension and technical ingenuity; more disconcerting is the complete lack of good, honest gore […]

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