Reviews

The sorority sisters of a sorority house formed on the site of a series of brutal murders are terrorized by threatening phone calls and, soon, they start to disappear and/or be murdered one by one. Could the killer from all those years ago have returned for Christmas?

Gore fans can rejoice with Black Christmas! It has enough splattery goodness and eyeballs being thrown around for 15 slasher movies. Unfortunately, this is about all it has to offer. The characters all look and sound the same and there's no effort at all to build tension or deliver scares. It's pure camp, but it's well shot with lots of brightly colored Christmas ambience.

A struggling single mother buys a doll for her son's birthday, not knowing it contains the soul of a deranged serial killer.

After years of Chucky being a part time murderer and full time comic, it's easy to forget how frightening this first film in the franchise is. Catherine Hicks and Chris Sarandon commit to their roles wonderfully and lend a lot of class and believability to the outrageous premise. The effects work is still as fresh and awe-inspiring all these years later.

Sidney Presscott returns to Woodsboro to promote her new memoir and has to face yet another mysterious killer in that Ghostface costume who wants to kill her and everyone around her including returning characters, Dewey and Gale.

Scream 4 seemed to be planned as a soft reboot of the franchise, but it mostly feels like reheated leftovers. They were great the first time, but they've lost something after being microwaved. There aren't a lot of surprises left and the self-referencial humor that was so winning in the first few films has become either stale or silly. It doesn't have anything really interesting to say about remakes or reboots in general.

Michael Myers returns to his childhood home only to find an annoying assortment of wannabe reality TV stars inside trying to shoot a cheesy reality show. Naturally, he decides to chop them all up.

While it's admirable that the filmmakers decided to embrace the then current reality TV craze with shows like Survivor and The Real World, this decision really ages the film and makes it feel like the most dated entry in the franchise. Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks, clearly only cast due to their current popularity, aren't natural thespians by any stretch of the imagination and this hurts the film. The rest of the cast isn't much better and leave you rooting for Michael to show up and get rid of all of them.

After 40 years of being locked away, Michael Myers escapes during a transfer to another facility and returns to Haddonfield for another Halloween massacre. Little does he know that his surviving victim, Laurie Strode, has been planning for this for the past 4 decades and is ready for him.

It's obvious that the filmmakers love the original Halloween, but they get a little bogged down with visual and aural homages to John Carpenter's classic and don't spend enough time with the script. None of the characters, even Curtis' Laurie Strode, feel like real human beings and the dialogue is strained and forced at times. It's to Curtis' credit that she attempts to make something out of what little she's given in the script.

A deranged woman falls apart after the teenage nephew she raised decides to leave her for college. Soon, she's murdering anyone who gets in the way of her plan of keeping him home forever.

Both disturbing and insanely campy, Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is a little known treat for any serious horror fan. Susan Tyrrell bulldozes through her role like a combination of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis on crack during their Grande Dame Guignol phase. It's a performance that simply can't be described and she alone is worth seeing the film for, but the script is a twisty marvel in and of itself and very much unlike the slashers coming out around the same time.

Young Michael Myers murders a handful of people including his sister and stepfather on Halloween night as a small child and is sent to a mental hospital under the care of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) until he ultimately decides he can't cure him. Michael breaks out on the eve of Halloween and returns home to terrorize the other sister he left behind and her friends.

Whether through writing or acting, the three female leads comes across horribly and you're actively rooting for Michael to tear into them. While it's brave of Zombie to take the complete opposite approach of Carpenter's original, it doesn't ever gel into anything particularly compelling. The violence is far more graphic and brutal, but the film is never suspenseful or scary.

A small seaside town celebrating the anniversary of its founding is visiting by vengeful ghosts who want blood for the town's forefathers murdering them all those years ago.

It's a simple story well told by John Carpenter, Debra Hill, and one of the best ensemble casts ever put in a horror film. Dean Cundey's moody cinematography does a lot of the heavy lifting when the script falters and gets silly.

Helen (an excellent Virginia Madsen), a grad student doing her thesis on urban legends, gets a huge tip when she hears about a grisly legend coming out of the local housing project, Cabrini Green. The legend involves a mysterious hook-handed slasher named Candyman who can be summoned by saying his name 5 times in the mirror. After doing that, Candyman appears and, this time, he's going to make sure he's not forgotten, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

Director Bernard Rose directs with hypnotic style helped by Phillip Glass' haunting music score and memorable performances from Madsen and Tony Todd as the titular boogeyman. It's a cinematic version of hearing a spooky urban legend around a campfire.

Demented is a prime slice of the kind of low budget horror/exploitation stuff that doesn't get made anymore. Depending who you are, they might be a good thing or a bad thing.

Sallee Eyse plays Linda, a rape victim who starts to lose her mind and see every man as a potential threat. It doesn't help that her husband (porn star Harry Reems) leaves home every chance he can to sleep around. Left alone, Linda's mental health deteriorates until she becomes a cold-blooded murderess.

It's all very tacky and shot and acted without any real style, but there are a few moments where it comes to life.

Sarah Paulson gets a big lead in a feature film after years on American Horror Story and also gets one of her best, most interesting roles to date. Paulson plays the mother of a handicapped daughter who might be deliberately making her sick so she won't have to be alone. We've seen this material covered in both The Act (also on Hulu) and Ryan Murphy's The Politician (albeit in a much more comic light), but this is the most horrifying version of the DeeDee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard story to date with more emphasis on creating suspense and terror than pathos or laughs. The suspense is strong here and there were quite a few moments where I was on the edge of my couch, anxious about what was to happen next.

Coming off the equally fun Happy Death Day movies, Christopher Landon has begun to carve out an entertaining niche for himself in the horror/comedy genre. He's able to combine slasher thrills, gore, wacky comedy, and heartfelt moments better than anyone else can and he continues that tradition with Freaky. The script is funny, the pacing is quick, the gore effects are memorable, and the performances by Kathryn Newton and Vince Vaughn are some of the finest I've seen in either a horror or comedy film in a long time.

A lonely young woman attempts to make the perfect friend out of the parts of the less than perfect people from her day to day life.

May manages to be both awkwardly funny and horrifying in equal measure which is no easy feat. Angela Bettis is a refreshingly quirky and unforgettable lead character and Jeremy Sisto and Anna Faris give her ample support. Less patient viewers might be put off by the lack of blood, but the more character driven ones will probably really enjoy it.

After a patient clutching a Halloween mask is murdered by a crazy man who sets himself on fire, a doctor and his patient's daughter head to a small town where these masks are being made and they uncover an evil plot to make this Halloween the deadliest one ever.

An unfairly maligned sequel in the Halloween franchise, Halloween III offers more chills and atmospheric moments than most of the other Michael Myers-heavy sequels put together. While some of the effects are cheesy, John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's creepy synth score keeps the film dripping with dread and Dean Cundey's cinematography is some of his moodiest and most beautiful.

A bullied high school student uses her telekinetic powers to terrorize those who torment her.

The script for this TV adaptation of Stephen King's novel is better than expected, but poor CGI, cinematography, a terrible ending, and some bad performances hold it back from being as good as it could have been. Angela Bettis is excellent as Carrie and makes the role her own, but Patricia Clarkson comes across as too controlled and cold as her abusive mother to ever scare us. It's a different, brave interpretation of the character, but it's not entirely successful in the end. With one of the main villains of the story being portrayed as so toothless, it waters things down a lot.

After hitting a man with their car, 4 teens throw the body in the water and are stalked by a killer fisherman a year later who wants them to pay for their crime.

It's not a bad set up, but the only interesting character is Sarah Michelle Gellar's Helen. She's given all the best material and Jennifer Love Hewitt is only allowed to mope and pout as Julie, the lead of the movie. Some moments do have a great level of suspense, especially during Helen's chase throughout the town and department store, but the finale and killer reveal is so convoluted that my head still hurts.

College students doing research are taken prisoner by deranged Nazi psychos and that's about all I can really say, because this movie is so bizarre.

Horror House on Highway Five opens with a fairly normal opening for a slasher film with a killer in a Richard Nixon mask sneaking into a woman's house while she showers and killing her, but everything that happens after that makes it feel like it's all her her fever dream as she comes close to death's door. Nothing makes any sense, but it's all so charmingly bizarre and homespun with love that it's hard to look away.

Several college friends have car trouble and end up in a mysterious town where the star attraction is a wax museum where the dummies are made from equally unlucky travelers.

House of Wax takes nearly an hour to get going, but once it does, it never lets up and delivers one of the goriest and nastiest slasher films of the last 20 years. Those with less patience might find themselves shutting the film off early, but that'd be a big mistake. The cast is likable including Paris Hilton who doesn't have many lines but doesn't embarrass herself too much.

A college April fool's party in an abandoned frat house awakens the vengeful spirit of a long dead frat boy who wants to cause a lot of death and destruction.

It's easy to see why many people don't care for Killer Party. You're never really sure where you stand with it. Is it a slasher movie? A ghost movie? A possession movie? A college comedy? It's all of those things depending on when you decided to tune in and it balances all the elements as well as could be expected, making it seem like it was all intentionally genre bending. There's a nice female friendship at the heart of the film that adds a lot of balance to all the genre hopping.

Alice thought she banished Freddy forever in the last film, but she finds herself pregnant and her baby somehow brings Freddy back into her and her friends' lives.

The Dream Child has a wonderful Gothic atmosphere and some of the dream sequences and death scenes are inspired, but the movie feels like it runs out of steam about 30 minutes in and never really recovers. I felt like I was sleepwalking through the rest of it.

A child's accidental death is covered up by her classmates and, on the night of their senior prom, someone dressed all in black goes after them to punish them for their ghastly secret.

This one is slow as can be, but if you have patience, Prom Night will make it up to you with a pretty decent last half hour which includes one of the most tragic and bleakest endings you're likely to find in a slasher movie. In the meantime, there's a lot of high school drama and a really useless subplot about an escaped mental patient that seems shoehorned in to give it more similarity to Halloween.

Jason survives his machete wound from the last film, dusts himself off, and goes looking for more victims in the woods and discovers yet another group of fun loving kids who have recently arrived at one of their family's cabins and Jason is only too eager to slice 'em and dice 'em.

Steve Miner returns to direct this sequel and he's rather adept at creating suspense even when the script seems to be working against him. A lot of the 3D effects do feel sillier when you're watching it in 2D at home, but the rousing last act makes up for a lot of the film's problems. It's also notable for being the first film where Jason wore his iconic hockey mask.

A young boy accidentally kills his mother while playing with his father's gun. Distraught, his father has a break from reality and, years later, the young man takes his college buddies to his family's beach house for a little fall break fun and his father shows up, still angry at what his son did, so he decides to punish him and his friends by going on a bloody rampage.

You have to put together a lot of pieces yourself as you watch The Mutilator. Where has this nutty father been all this time? Why did he pick now to go on a killing spree? This movie isn't one for nuanced character development and deep psychological insight, but the murder scenes are a gory delight and a few scenes crackle with some suspense.

Serial killer, Angela, returns after taking a little break and poses as a camper so that she can slaughter the morally reprehensible campers at a camp designed to bring kids together. There's some funny attempts at satire in here with Sandra Dorsey stealing the show as Lilly, the ditzy head of the camp. All the murders seem to have been butchered by the MPAA which is a shame, but at least the movie knows how to leave when the getting is good and barely clocks in at well under 90 minutes.

Undead prom queen Mary Lou returns to seduce a high school boy into joining her in hell even if it means killing off everyone close to him. The Last Kiss turns Mary Lou from the good time girl in the last film to a man hungry and lovestruck Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction type and I'm not sure if it was the best choice. There was something somewhat feminist about Mary Lou in the last film and in this one she's reduced to another jealous girlfriend cliche. It's still not as bad as many would say and it's amusing enough to distract you for 90 minutes.