Horror is for Grrrls

              The remake boom of 2000s horror was largely the product of a single distribution company, the Michael-Bay-owned Platinum Dunes, which snatched up pretty much every major slasher franchise that wasn’t Halloween and released a string of gritty reboots from 2004-2010. Repetitive as it may have been, it made sense to adapt these films for the torture porn era of horror. Movies like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Friday the 13 th had been controversial in their time for their violence and gore – why not bring these nasty properties back for a new generation of gorehounds? What was happening over at rival studio Dark Castle made a little less sense.             Dark Castle actually predates Platinum Dunes by a few years, which destroys my original theory that Platinum Dunes bought up all the rights, leaving Dark Castle with the scraps. No, I think it’s more likely that Dark Castle made a s...

               As coincidence would have it, I ended last year and started this one with two movies set in places where I am kind of from (and that feature caves, albeit to very different effect). The Lair of the White Worm is set in Derbyshire, where my dad’s side of the family hail from, and I can confirm that the absurd accents are indeed accurate. Derbyshire is a great place for a horror movie, full of quaint English countryside, strangely sloping landscapes, and a sense of long history. The Lair of the White Worm doesn’t necessarily capitalize on that spooky potential; it’s got other things on its mind.             Based on Bram Stoker’s final novel, The Lair of the White Worm opens with the very Scottish archaeologist Angus Flint finding the skull of some kind of a wormlike or dinosaur-adjacent creature from Roman times. The skull may be related to the local legen...

Would you date this vampire?              Though Disney’s cinematic output was having the opposite of a renaissance when I was a kid, their brand remained strong enough that my parents associated them with quality entertainment, and so all through elementary school I watched a whole lot of Disney Channel. With the exception of stone-cold classics like Kim Possible , I can’t say I loved any of the shows – it was just that they were on and they were safe. But the movies, the DCOMs that is, were something else.             As trash made-for-TV movies go, DCOMs have a special place in my heart. The very first DCOM, Under Wraps , was released the year I was born. The early 2000s were a heyday for the genre, as Disney pumped out something like ten a year. Cheaply made, they mostly fit into easy, recognizable templates, sports movies and family dramas and of course Halloween movies like Under Wraps , an...

  Look ma, I'm just like Dario Argento             Like most bad movies, I Know Who Killed Me is constructed from the hacked-off pieces of other, better movies. Argento lighting. De Palma split screen. Doppelgangers from Lynch and   granddaddy Hitchcock and great-granddaddy Bergman. And like most bad movies, I Know Who Killed Me reveals that there is more to these great filmmakers than style-for-style’s-sake, that contrary to popular belief it is not that easy to make a Lynch film or a giallo, at least a good one. In these stylish movies, the style informs the substance; in their poor imitations, the style replaces substance. Let me explain. What does the color blue mean in Blue Velvet ? It is not too easy to say. It recalls the cheeseball Bobby Vinton song that gives the film its name, a piece of boomer nostalgia laced with unmistakable menace. Blue is associated with the night, with underworld cool, with the otherworldly. In Lynchworl...

  Name a worse love story than Glitter, I'll wait             At the beginning of December, journalist and podcaster Sarah Marshall took to Twitter to make the following observation:   Her followers wracked their collective brains to add Fargo and Hidden Figures to the list, along with The Adams Family and Adams Family Values , but only if we count “being a hot goth” as an important job. And that’s it! Marshall went on to lay out the rules of the Marshall Test:             These do not appear to be very stringent criteria, and yet a movie that passes the Marshall Test is extremely elusive. While movies that star women doing important jobs are increasingly common, the real obstacle to passing the Marshall Test is the insidious ubiquity of a shitty archetype: the Boyfriend Whomst Throws a Hissy. And no movie depicts this archetype in its purest form quite lik...

             Roadrash presents my review of Hobgoblins             Last spring, to procrastinate on my thesis, I wrote my true magnum opus, a definitive taxonomy of bad movies . In doing so, I discussed many of what I then considered to be the finest bad movies of all time – classics like Plan 9 and the Room , my personal favorite Manos: The Hands of Fate , and lesser known gems like A Talking Cat?!? and Hackers . Yet at the time of writing, there was still so much I didn’t know. I reference Birdemic in the article despite having not yet seen it, and the work of the most recent bad movie auteur (category 1c) Neil Breen was as-yet unfamiliar to me. Cats , which may go down in history as Hollywood’s greatest Flop (category 1b), hadn’t even dropped its infamous trailer yet. Most egregious at all, I hadn’t yet seen a film that is now as dear to my heart than Manos , a film that troubl...