★★★ out of ★★★★★
Vampires and circuses! Two great tastes that pair wonderfully said together. Said no one. Ever. But it’s true. It happened. All courtesy of classic horror studio Hammer films. In 1972 someone thought up this brainy coupling and vampires were meshed together in to the world of circuses. Not necessarily a fad that lasted, but at least we got one vampire/circus mashup!
★★★ out of ★★★★★
Don’t say it…hissss it! The tagline from the trailer for the most unusual horror film ever made really hits the nail on the head.
★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
Come for the insane 1970s Italian gore! Stay for the superb Goblin soundtrack! It’s all here! Frankly, is there anything more you could ever ask from a horror film? Well, maybe.
★ out of ★★★★★ It looks like a horror film. It acts like a horror film. It’s directed by cinema great and heir to the Hitchcock throne. Its promotional materials portend horror is just around the corner. But don’t be fooled, this super-star-packed 1970s telekinetic hype machine is nothing but a boring and unnecessarily long after-school special.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ Everyone gets old. It’s no more complicated than this little horrifying truism. The world of horror is filled with ghosts, homicidal nutcases, Pazzuzu, creepies, crawlies, and robot-monsters. But, nothing, repeat, nothing, is more frightening at the prospect of losing your mental and physical faculties and facing the sad and potential finite end of life.
★★ out of ★★★★★ Crack open the dusty dictionary parked over on your bookshelf and look up staid British horror film. We’ll wait. What’s it say? 1976’s Satan’s Slave? Yep, that’s what we thought.
If you’re a regular listener to our little ol’ podcast you’ve probably heard us wax poetically about the (sadly) uneven implementation of one of the greatest horror plot lines of all time — the Amityville Horror. If you’re of a certain age Amityville and the Lutz family was all the talk. On the newsstands, in the classroom, at the water cooler. People were…um…obsessed…with this sad family and their demonic plight.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ When true film auteurs wander outside of their staid and classical lines and in to the horror genre there’s always the potential for some serious magic. Kubrick with the Shining, Freidkin with the Exorcist, Spielberg with Jaws, and even Danny Boyle with 28 Days Later. All these major film think-o-logists had a crack at horror and walked away proud at what they had accomplished, or so ashamed at the terror they had brought to the cineplex, they never came back to the genre. One of the greatest film auteurs of all time, Robert Altman, wandered in to horror with aplomb, but sadly his seminal effort has been forgotten in the sands of time.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★ The Demon Seed is one mighty mashup of technological/sociological concepts. Freedom of choice, meets man’s desire to concur his natural surroundings, meets the infallibility of the god complex, meets sexual politics, meets the ecology movement, meets the military industrial complex, meets a horrifying faux 2001 psychedelic freakout. Yes, it’s all here on display in a 1970s groove.
★★ out of ★★★★★ At Rob Zombie’s darkened dirtbag core is a full and unfiltered embrace of the age-old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Slow motion. Hyperbolic acting (or in some cases no acting). Closeups so close you can count individual pores Captain Spaulding’s grease-paint soaked forehead. Weirdly rare and off-putting selection of non-Joe Walsh James Gang tracks. If you’ve seen House of a Thousand Corpses and Devil’s Rejects then you’ve been thoroughly exposed to Mr. Zombie’s cinema trickery.
★★★★ 1/2 out of ★★★★★ Vampires have been around for a long time (read: possibly forever?) and their story has been told in a weirdly limitless number of ways. Sexy vampires. Gory vampires. Child vampires. Deaf vampires. Suffice it to say, the votes are in and humanity LOVES its vampires!
🔪🔪🔪🔪out of 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪
Siamese Twins at Birth: What the Devil hath joined together let no man cut asunder.
We’ll just park this over here in the What the What!?!?!? category. Apparently, and justifiably, unsatisfied with the 2006 remake […]
★ out of ★★★★★
If you went to Sunset Strip and asked a hip-looking millennial what elements exemplified the grindhouse cinema era, what do you think the response would be? Confused? Indifferent? Bored? Titillated? Or do you think they’d start to rattle off a listed of oft-used Rob Zombie tropes and tripe?
Nothing says Hammer Films like repressed Christians, the Victorian age, and whole lot of pent up sexual frustrations. Enter: Demons of the Mind from 1972.
Here’s the poster for one of the rarer and apparently one of the last of the Hammer horror freakouts. This […]
Blue Holocaust, Buio Omega, Beyond the Darkness, In quella casa Buio omega, the Third Eye…doesn’t matter what you call this 1979 […]
A horror film so notable that we have TWO reviewers on this one! I think you may have heard about […]
Run sister, run! Get out there! Pronto! According to the horror team at IMDB this fun little slab of celluloid […]
50,000 years of death stalks the subways!!! Wow. Kung Fu! Blaxspoitation! Monsters! Subways! Gritty NYC! Exclamation Points!!! This deceivingly simple […]
★★ out of ★★★★★
Pazuzu? Seriously you can’t come up with a scarier demon name?
