When it was released in 1967, Spider Baby (or the Maddest Story Ever Told) barely made a ripple. And that’s probably a generous assessment. Just about no one saw the Jack Hill-written and directed exploitation thriller. Even the presence of an older Lon Chaney Jr. (The Wolf Man) had little impact. Of course, Chaney was […]
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When Becky made its way to digital platforms in June 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic overshadowed the little action-thriller as it did everything else. No one was thinking about movies amidst the peak of the pandemic and certainly not small indie thrillers. But Becky and its mix of exploitation, gruesome practical effects, and willingness to […]
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Today, horror fans may have a hard time understanding the controversy that met Silent Night, Deadly Night. And it stirred up plenty of angst amongst critics and some parent groups. Nearly 40 years have passed and we’ve seen a handful of ‘Killer Santa’ movies that have elicited collective shrugs. Instead, audiences have mostly ignored movies […]
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Not every 80s slasher became a big franchise like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Some one-off’s, like Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, and The House on Sorority Row, found new audiences during the 2000s remake craze. Other slashers lingered in obscurity with their small but devoted fanbases. Few slashers better embody […]
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Along with The Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave, I Drink Your Blood is one of the more controversial exploitation movies of the 1970s. Its story of a Satanic hippie cult on a rabies-fueled rampage clearly took cues from the Manson Family murders. At the time of its release, the […]
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As the Hays Code receded and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system too over, Western cinema took a drastic turn into the experimental in the late 60s and 1970s. Briefly, this was an era that saw a rise in more risky story-telling. Art-house sensibilities mixed with box office mainstream in movies like […]
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Happy Mother’s Day! As Norman Bates famously said in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, ‘a boy’s best friend is his mother’. All boys are ‘mama’s boys’ at heart. Regardless of your age, when you’re sick, you probably still call out for your mother. And horror movie mothers are no less devoted to their children. Even casual moviegoers […]
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Across Quentin Tarantino’s impressive filmography, most critics and fans consider Death Proof to be his most inconsequential work. Even Tarantino himself ranks it at the bottom of his directorial efforts. Originally, Dimension Films released Death Proof as part of a double-bill alongside Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror under the moniker, Grindhouse. As far as gimmicks go, […]
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