Retro Reviews

There are a few films in my personal collection that I consider particularly brutal, and I only watch them once every so often. They’re not exactly light-hearted entertainment. The subject matter is gritty, real, and drawn out to an uncomfortable degree. Very realistic. Wes Craven’s original The Last House On …

Poor emotional regulation apparently runs heavily in the White family genes. 25 years after the release of Stephen King’s novel, and 23 years after the award-winning film adaptation of Carrie (1976), we learned that the legacy of the White family had hardly stopped with Carrie (Sissy Spacek, Castle Rock, 2018), …

If there’s one person capable of capturing the psychological unraveling of a tortured writer, it’s Stephen King. His novella, Secret Window, Secret Garden was published in the collection, Four Past Midnight (1990). It depicts a writer whose life is in shambles and whose mind is sure to follow. Adapted for the …

For the most part, the Universal monster films I saw as a kid (Saturday afternoons when I was a wee lad on WUAB 43 out of Cleveland, Super Host!!) were pretty engrossing to my pre-adolescent mind. Lugosi’s Dracula was creepy, as was Karloff’s muted menacing in Frankenstein, but the full …

2015’s The Slashening was a solid, hilarious horror/comedy film filled with enough gags, gore and winks and nods to the audience to satisfy even the most ardent of Troma fans. Finally arriving on Blu-ray, writer/director Brandon Bassham’s (Shakespeare’s Shitstorm) 2021 gonzo, irreverent sequel, Slashening: The Final Beginning takes it up …

“Based on true events” films are hit and miss. Often over dramatized and of dubious quality, they can easily fall into terrible TV reenactment territory. The Lost, adapted from the late Jack Ketchum’s (The Girl Next Door) novel, that in turn was based upon real life killer Charles Schmid, is …

A ton of shot-on-video stuff, while inspired, fell through the cracks during the home video explosion of the late 80s-early 90s. But, while dusting this stuff off for sharper new releases, Wild Eye’s Visual Vengeance unearthed a lost gem that was (Yikes!) shot on Super-8: The Wrong Door. Synopsis Ted …

Cruel Intentions was released on March 5,1999. It was a modern retelling of the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses and was cast full of the popular young talent of the time. Let’s revisit this film and some movie trivia on its 25th anniversary to see if it is still deliciously evil …

The “Godfather of Gore,” Herschell Gordon Lewis (The Gore, Gore Girls) left a blood soaked, indelible mark on horror with many of his films before his passing, none was more notorious at the time, than Blood Feast. This was controversial stuff in 1963, in fact, its tagline, “nothing so appalling …

February 27, 2024, is the 20th anniversary of the release of the movie Club Dread. Over time, the film has essentially become a cult classic. Enough has been written about the comedy troupe behind the film, Broken Lizard, the guys behind Super Troopers. so rather than focus on them, this …