The Home Of The Brave

It's appropriate that Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (or Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist, depending on who you ask) opens with the strains of The Star Spangled Banner as this is a movie that celebrates the promise of the Land of the Free (the Freeling family being the embodiment of the American Dream) while reminding us that the land of plenty is made of haunted ground from sea to shining sea.

Over at Shock Till You Drop, I'm looking back at Poltergeist as part of our Summer Shocks series. To read the full review, click here. And if you're a citizen of the U.S. of A. be sure to rise for the playing of our national anthem.

Happy Memorial Day!

All Fur One And One Fur All

As part of the Summer Shocks retrospective running over at Shock Till You Drop, managing editor Ryan Turek has taken a look back at the often-neglected Wolfen (1981). Having the misfortune of coming out the same year that The Howling and An American Werewolf in London raised the bar for werewolf cinema, Wolfen looked awfully weak, what with no transformation FX to give it that competitive edge. Nowadays it look like some kind of almost-classic in need of rediscovery, a horror film of rare adult character. It also carries an eerie foreshadowing of our post-9/11 age. It's haunting to listen to characters in this New York City-set film (this is one of the greatest NYC movies ever shot, by the way) discussing the threat of global terrorism with frequent shots of the Twin Towers dominating the skyline.

It's fitting that Wolfen is about shape-shifters as it's an altogether different animal from most horror films. Director Michael Wadleigh came up with something compelling and it shows. Unfortunately, it just wasn't immediately obvious to most audiences at the time.

To read Ryan's full Wolfen review, click here.

Summer Shocks 1981: Deadly Blessing

When I was in junior high, I had a friend whose parents were way more permissive than mine when it came to R-rated movies. I couldn't even see them on cable but this kid saw all the new horror releases on the big screen. When we got together at the beginning of school in the fall of '81, the first movie I asked him about was Deadly Blessing. The TV spots and newspaper ads for it had terrified me over the last month of summer vacation and I had to know if I was right to be pissing in my pants over it. Having gone to the drive-in to see it with his parents, he assured me that it was one of the best horror movies he had ever seen, reserving high praise for the spider-in-the-mouth dream sequence.

When I finally saw the movie for myself on VHS, I was not disappointed. It remains such a terrific shocker (rewatching it just the other week, there was a 'gotcha' scare involving Sharon Stone's character in a barn that 'got me' so badly - even though I knew it was coming - that I damn near sprained my neck!) and it's such a key movie in Wes Craven's filmography (bringing dream imagery into his work in a big way) that I'm puzzled as to why it hasn't been given a Region 1 DVD release.

Whatever the reason for its absence on disc, here's hoping that one day it'll get the exposure - and the wider fanbase - it deserves.

To read my full Deadly Blessing review click here.

Summer Shocks 1980: Friday the 13th

The new installment of Summer Shocks is up at Shock Till You Drop and for our look at 1980, I'm giving some love to Sean Cunningham's original summer camp slayathon Friday the 13th. Hard to believe how notorious this movie once was but those who were around back then will recall the angry furor over Friday's graphic gore. I still love the movie and think it endures as a wistful, sun-dappled snapshot of a time when the world (and the horror audience) wasn't so jaded.

To read my full review, click here.

Fly On The Wall

While watching the original Amityville Horror (1979) last week, this sinister piece of artwork displayed in the public library that James Brolin's George Lutz briefly visits jumped right out at me. I don't know if this creepy caricature is supposed to be a fly, or if it's some other kind of winged insect, but it sure looks like an emissary of Beelzebub to me. It's come and gone in an instant and Lutz never notices it but given the issues that he's having at home with flies gathering, I thought its placement in this scene was a buzz-worthy choice in decor. It's one sly fly.

One Day We'll All Meet In Our Happy Place

For the sake of my television, I'm so glad I stopped watching Lost at the beginning of its third season. Had I gone against my best judgement and stuck with the show for the duration, I'm sure something would've gone flying through my TV set by the end of Lost's finale last night. Now, to be fair I didn't watch the entire finale, just the last half hour but I think I get the gist - the future timeline where they're all off the island is heaven, or at least some version of the afterlife, and the characters have all reunited there in spirit because their time on the island was the most significant event in their lives (I guess it's hard to top living on a magic island). Some got off the island, some stayed, but in time they all died and met again in some version of the hereafter. Um, that's supposed to be an ending?

I don't have much steam to blow off about Lost because I ditched it so early on but as far as I'm concerned, this was a six year scam on its audience and for what it's worth, I hope the writers and producers are called out for it. I don't doubt that some Lost fans found the finale emotional but let's be honest - if you took any long-running show and ended it with all the characters reuniting in fucking heaven, you'd get the exact same reaction. It's the lowest kind of emotional baiting (well, almost the lowest - it's probably even cheaper to have a wounded character stagger off alone and be kept company in their dying moments by a dog, which Lost's finale also stooped to). Compare the narrative smoke and mirrors practiced by Lost with the way a show like Supernatural has consistently played straight and true with its audience and I think the critical acclaim and adulation Lost has received over the years is nearly criminal.

Mysteries and ambiguities are fine but what the makers of Lost delivered was an epic cop-out. What's worse is that they clearly had this cop-out ending in mind for years, an ending that they knew would answer none of the show's long-standing questions. To call it a six season shell game with the audience would be giving Lost more credit than it deserves. In the end, it was just a full-on con job.

Summer Shocks

If you think that things have been quiet around here lately because I've been slacking off, that's not quite the case. Instead I've been busy gearing up for a big summer project over at Shock Till You Drop. It occurred to me recently that while the fall may be the time of the witching season, my most indelible horror movie memories belong primarily to the summer months. Shock's managing editor Ryan Turek is of the same mind so we've decided to spend this summer celebrating thirty year's worth of our favorite summer horror releases. We're kicking off with the summer of 1979 with Ryan taking on The Tall Man's debut with Phantasm and myself making the trip to check out some infamous real estate in Long Island. We've got plenty of great movies lined up to reminisce about between now and Labor Day so I hope people will enjoy the ride!

Read Ryan's Phantasm review here.

Read my Amityville Horror review here.