Horror is for Grrrls

...the manosmyth if you will Guys, I love bad movies. Like, really bad movies. Bizarre dialogue, chronic overacting, chronic underacting, visible set errors, police officers scratching their heads with prop guns – I love it all. I’ve been watching a hearty stack of some of the worst films ever made this summer and amongst the suffering I have stumbled upon a treasure, my pick for the worst film of all time: Manos: The Hands of Fate Made in 1966 by El Paso insurance salesman Harold P. Warren on a bet, Manos is special because not only does it have the script and acting problems we expect from terrible movies, it shows supreme incompetence at the most technical levels of making a motion picture. In part due to the dirt poor budget and having to rent all the equipment etc. etc. only about thirty seconds of footage could be shot at one time and everything had to be dubbed in later by a handful of actors. This leads to painfully long reaction shots, conversing characters being ob...

---contains spoilers for Jennifer's Body --- Few things are as ingrained in the horror fan’s imagination as the ad campaigns for scary movies released when we were too chicken-shit for the genre. Whether glimpsed in the late lamented Blockbusters, movie theaters, or poorly timed trailers, nothing will ever be half as scary as we imagined those movies to be. Here’s to you, obtuse Silent Hill poster, slasher franchise reboots that made me think Freddy and Jason were twenty-first century inventions, ten-second Saw sequel trailer I saw in the video store, and 1997 film Jack Frost. And here’s to you, Jennifer’s Body.             I was just barely twelve when Jennifer’s Body was released to sexy, sexy ad campaigns and tepid reviews. I remember casting judgment on a friend who’d been allowed to see it and who raved about how good it was. I’m not sure why I got the impression that this was a gross-out pic (by any standard, it’s ...