Back in Doctor Who's heyday, the weekly numbers in Britain and America were huge. Big enough to lift BBC America into Tier 1 cable status, Tennant had emo girls throwing their panties at the TV, and the best episode of the year, the one everyone looked forward to, was the one that would be written by Steven Moffat.When Russel Davies decided that five years was enough, fans were worried about who was going to run the series. And then they...
She was on the set of It Takes a Thief when she got the bad news. Her backdoor pilot hadn’t been picked up. It wasn’t really a surprise. Laugh-in always buried that show in the ratings. It would have been her big break but, ah well, that’s show biz, she thought to herself. Teri Garr had no way to know that Star Trek had delivered her big break after all. Sad but expected bad news. The final curtain has fallen on...
We are currently living in a golden age of indie horror games. The last five years have seen an explosion in a genre that used to get one game a year back in the 1990s and one every three years during the double Os. Those AAA titles were good games, certainly better than what we get now from major studios but good horror? Well... Not so much really. They all had their moments to be sure. Clive Barker’s Undying was...
"[Undying]'s a dark fantasy with lots of levels, lots of realities in it. It's not horror in the sense of Hellraiser. It's horror which is very bloody, very graphic, with plenty of monsters, no question; but also a big adventure level in it. There is the sense, as you are visiting different dimensions and alien cities, that a monster in an alien city is a different thing than a monster sitting in your kitchen sink!” – Clive BarkerClive Barker started...
Well, it is the best of the Venom movies. I do have to give it that. Even if that is about the same as being the finest hockey player in Zimbabwe. It did have a few things going for it that the others didn’t. I can actually remember what happened during this movie. That’s new for Venom.Due to some arcane filmmaking technique known only to Sony Marvel. The previous Venom films stubbornly refuse to move from short-term memory register to...
“The history of horror is basically a history of what we aren’t all that frightened of anymore.Horror began appropriately enough in France shortly after the Reign of the Terror. Religion was officially outlawed. The Catholic Church had been forced out of the country and if you were going to worship anything at all, it had to be the Goddess of Reason. Graveyards were filled with dead people who were according to the First Republic, gone forever. They were in an...
I know it's Kinski. Shut up about it.Nosferatu: Derivation from the Slavic Nesuferitu; defined as insufferable OneGreek word: Nosphoros - disease-bearingThe etymology indicates a common Indo-European root word. Possibly pre-historic in originSomething that was whispered in hushed tones around Pleistocene campfires.Nosferatu is the oldest surviving movie based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There may or may not have been a Russian Dracula film made in 1920, although it’s possible that that movie only got as far as an announcement. No known...
Fright Night (1985)We are now into much better-known territory. At least for the first one.The Plot: horror movie geek Charlie Brewster, thinks that a real-life vampire has moved in next door to him. Everyone thinks he's nuts, including the has-been Hammer-Horror actor turned Monster-Chiller-Horror-Theater UHF TV host, Peter Vincent (the perfect name by the way). Peter Vincent is hired by Charlie to hunt the Vampire Next Door. Peter thinks it will be much easier just to prove that Jerry...
REPOST: 5 October 2023. I like to repost this one, every year in the lonesome October. Ah, Horror. The "lesser genre".Eternally demeaned, abused, and snubbed by the elders of the film industry.Yet almost all of the major filmmakers started out in it. The only genre that has produced more mainstream directors is no-shit porn and I am not kidding about that.Rather than do some best-of-all-time horror movies list I will just concentrate on the 1980s.The Eighties represent a unique...
The memory of Ralph Bates is in an unfortunate position. The son of two Psychiatrists he had a unique approach to the craft of drama being able to concentrate on the deeper drives of characters and more importantly those of the characters he was playing against. He had enough raw talent to land a scholarship to the Yale Drama School. When he returned to Britain he went into the more or less standardized path of an apprentice British actor, touring small...
