Look, I don’t watch a ton of TV[1]. It takes a lot to get me invested in a TV show, because it is a considerable time commitment, and if I plan on devoting that many hours of my life to watching something, it had better be good[2]. So far this decade, I have only watched…
Baddie: Curiosity killed the florist. Lesson: Never trust a talking plant. I was sorely tempted to watch some better known Corman classics for my second Octoberween movie, but ultimately I couldn’t resist the temptations of Little Shop of Horrors. One of my favorite musical movies (see this list), directed by one of my favorite directors, with Jack…Nicholson? This…
Last week, before exploring the dark, dark place known as the two live action Scooby-Doo movies, I gave a brief review of Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, a 1998 straight-to-video film that just about singlehandedly revived the franchise after—depending on how you count and how you feel about A Pup Named Scooby-Doo—about two decades of stagnation.…
In 1930, Universal Pictures faced an emerging problem. “Talkies” had just surpassed silent cinema as the industry standard, and though sound promised previously unrealized potential for movies, it also promised to shrink audiences. Silent movies were universal in a way films spoken in one language couldn’t be, and dubbing a film into different languages was nigh-impossible…
“It was a tumultuous time for our nation. The clear beverage craze gave us all a reason to live, the information superhighway showed the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek, and the domestication of the dog continued unabated.” Homer Simpson’s concise scene-setting of the early 1990s is only somewhat corroborated by the…
Stop motion animation has so much potential in its use for horror, as Tim Burton and Laika have shown us their films. Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, puts its stop motion animation to a different use, for a more comedic and quirky, though nonetheless Halloween-y film. This is the second time that Wallace…
Creating child-friendly horror is difficult. That’s not to say children aren’t easily scared –quite the opposite, really– but it’s not always easy for horror tv and movies aimed at a family audience to hit the mark. Perennial children’s Halloween favorites such as Hocus Pocus aims for humor more frequently than scares, whereas there are episodes of Rugrats that…
