Jack Finney’s 1956 Collier’s magazine serial Invasion of The Bodysnatchers is as vital an original work as George Romero’s first zombie movie in 1968. It’s imminently adaptable and re-adaptable, tweaking it ever so slightly for a whole new metameaning depending on society’s anxieties of the day. In 1956, the story couched its thinly […]
Some movies are made for a very specific niche audience, but delight better than any mass crowd-pleaser. Fido is just such a film. The premise: It’s 1951. Those zombie wars were a generation ago, and are now over (we won, by the way, or so we believe). For the last 25-30 years, we have enjoyed […]
Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor)
Catch it on HBO
Fans of Night Watch, we eagerly gobbled up previews for this sequel. The trilogy is based on popular Russian fantasy novel by Sergey Lukyanenko (1998), and began with the excellent film Night Watch. We rushed out to our local art-house theater to fight the crowds we had fought the […]
As a sequel with a new director and cast, 28 Weeks Later had the potential to just be a franchise for franchise’s sake, like Halloween 3, or any direct-to-landfill profit release, like Bring It On Again. Thankfully, director/co-writer Juan Carlos Fresnadilla took the psychological zing of 28 Days Later and turned it into an […]
The 1976 Omen scared the padiddle out of me. My best friend Portia and I would hole up in my room to watch it, and we were very young, maybe under 10, and scare ourselves silly with these movies. Maybe it was our age and our mutual propensity to wind each other up, […]
I am told by aficionados of the source game that this movie looks and feels exactly like the computer game that is its source material. Unlike the successful and fun computer game adaptation of Resident Evil, or the brilliant and witty board game adaptation Clue, Silent Hill appears to just want to render its […]
Nochnoi Dozor
Highly anticipated, we waited eagerly for two years to see Night Watch after first hearing about it. Russia, not wanting to be left behind by the U.S. and Japan in creating creepy cool horror films that keep people up (talking or shuddering, depending on your tolerance level), has given us this first in a […]
OK. There are movies about vampires, and there are movies about werewolves, and occasionally, both (even with Stooges) but what strikes me here is that the Underworld movies want desperately to be about both, but somehow end up being about familial squabbles and centuries-old politics. If you’re reading this review with any intent […]
If you have ever heard of Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, this film is its artistic alter ego. So many movies involving vampires these days go in one of two directions (both far away from Bram Stoker’s original re-invention of the legend) - either goth-rock toughies or embarrassingly cheesey suavesters. Eternal is […]
Keep in mind that this review comes from a gal who laughed giddily through all of 2004’s zombie movies and who doesn’t blink during Terminator or Saving Private Ryan or Desperado. I’m no doily-crocheting pastor’s wife with an agenda and a Hayes Code sampler on the wall. This movie is obscene. Not […]
