Years ago, I used to live in Sacramento, California, but spent part of my week working up in Incline Village, Nevada (near Reno). During the winter, this commute would occasionally involve driving through crazed snowstorms…

This is a FANTASTIC novella. “Final Girl is Tired” is hooked around an obvious conceit, basically laid out in the title. Final girl Maxine Hart survived a Jason Voorhees-like killer decades ago. Now in her…

Little-known fact about me: my favorite band is Devo. I’ve loved those mutant New Wave rockers ever since I first heard them when I stumbled into a record store in Honolulu (where I grew up)…

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie where I genuinely thought parts were missing. Like scenes are referred to, and I’m rolling back the video to see if I accidentally jumped ahead. But…

The more I think about it, the more I realize that 2005 “Stay” is a very interesting film. I think we’re also familiar with the notion that part of what the human mind does is…

I’m a little perplexed with this one. It’s called “The Shadow Man“ and has a spooky looking shadow man on the cover, so I figured I was getting something pretty close to horror. But this…

“Night Screams” starts with a film-within-a-film motif. A young woman is disrobing in a locker room and possibly being stalked by an intruder. But then—quelle surprise!—we find out that what’s actually happening is a married…

I came to watch this film via a roundabout process. Around twenty years ago, I lived in LA and went on a date with an attractive bartendress from a watering hole I frequented. She told…

Sometimes a movie tries too hard. Like everyone, I loved “Silence of the Lambs.” And I’m a fan of the follow-up, “Hannibal”, with its great “brain-eating scene.” (How could you not love a good (or…

“Deadly Manor”, made in 1990, is a horror film about a group of young people (including a hitchhiker who may be more than he seems), who enter a mysterious mansion in the middle of a…

So I’ve got a theory about horror films. They’re at their best when they’re subversive—celebrations of nihilism from hustlers working the film industry’s fringes, just trying to make a quick buck. Think Craven’s “Last House…

If you’ve been reading my reviews, you’ve noticed I tend to focus my keen and critical eye on crime and horror films. As such, “Luce,“ a drama set around issues of race and class might…

What are young people in 80s horror movies supposed to do with themselves? All they wanna do is have sex, drink copious amounts of alcohol, and generally party-hearty. Yet there’s always somebody trying to kill…

I bet it would be a lot of fun to make one of these low-rent cheese ball horror films that populate the metaphorical bins of Amazon Video. You get some buddies together, track down a…

File this novella under: skin-crawling psycho-sexual thriller The protagonist, Dale, is your garden-variety passive creep. He’s a flop with the ladies and is pushed around by his hoity-toity family. But he’s got one thing going…