Horror

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“Eaten Alive” is director Tobe Hooper’s 1977 follow up to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974). While it is still a horror film that takes place in the deep South, it is a much different kind of film, and much like “Texas Chain Saw’s” first sequel, deals with a lot of humor, as well as over-the-top violence.

The story starts with an awkward semi-rape scene involving Buck (played by a young Robert Englund) and a young prostitute. Englund has said that the Japanese version of this opening sequence inserted images of a stunt double’s genitalia, though the American version was more tame.Read More »

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Two writers and their girlfriends visit the castle of an actor who specializes in playing vampire roles. As the night progresses, they begin to wonder if the man is an actor playing a vampire, or a vampire playing an actor.Read More »

PLOT – short version

A Thai tale of the legendary Krasue (also known as the ‘P’ Graseau, or the Penanggalan in Chinese), a Southeast Asian Ghost, composed of a disembodied witch with a flying head and entrails dangling beneath. Political intrigue, black magic, unrequited love and disembowlment all fit together perfectly for an evening of family fun with the witch with the flying head. Written by J.W. CaseRead More »

Koji Shiraishi is interested in strange indiscriminate murder at a sightseeing resort. He goes behind the camera to investigate the circumstances surrounding strange occurrences and interview the survivors.Read More »

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A scientist living in an apartment complex kills a girl and uses acid to destroy her internal organs, and then kills himself. While investigating, a doctor discovers that the scientist was doing experiments on the use of genetically engineered parasites as organ transplants. Soon, other people in the complex begin showing signs of carrying the parasites, spreading the things through wanton orgiastic abandon, and the complex begins suffering an attrition problem.Read More »

This big budget entry from the early ’80s horror boom is one of the most underrated of that genre. The Entity succeeds despite potentially exploitative subject matter because it tells its story in a serious, respectful style. Frank de Felitta’s script devotes as much time to building three-dimensional characters and detailing the inner workings of psychology and parapsychology as it does creating shocks. As a result, the horrific parts of the tale are more effective because they are couched in a compelling reality. That said, The Entity never feels like anything less than a horror movie, thanks to forceful direction by Sidney J. Furie, who uses moody cinematography from Stephen Burum and an obsessive, minimalist score by Charles Bernstein to create an edgy, off-kilter atmosphere guaranteed to keep the audience tense between the set pieces. Finally, and most importantly, The Entity hooks the viewer thanks to phenomenal performances. Barbara Hershey gives a warm, totally credible performance as a decent, strong woman thrust into a bizarre situation, and Ron Silver adds excellent support as a well-meaning psychologist whose desire to find a rational explanation harms the situation as often as it helps. On the downside, a few of the makeup effects aren’t very convincing (especially when compared with strong physical and visual effects) and the open-ended coda might turn off some viewers, but the overall craftsmanship of the film is too strong to be denied. In short, The Entity is worthy of rediscovery by horror fans who want a little substance with their shocks. — Donald Guarisco (AMG)Read More »

The film, made prior to the full enforcement of the Hays code, is remembered today for its strong sexual content, embodied mostly in the character of the prostitute, Ivy, played by Miriam Hopkins.

The secret of the astonishing transformation scenes was not revealed until decades later (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse).
Hyde enjoys the rain.
Hyde enjoys the rain.

A series of rotating filters matching the make-up was used on the lenses, enabling the make-up to be gradually exposed or made invisible, depending upon the scene.

Wally Westmore’s make-up for Hyde, simian and hairy with tusks influenced greatly the popular image of Hyde in media and comic books (the American Classics Illustrated edition of Jekyll and Hyde clearly based its design of Hyde on the Fredric March movie, although it is more toned down); in part this reflected the novella’s implication of Hyde as embodying repressed evil and hence being semi-evolved or simian in appearance.Read More »

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For my money, Abel Ferrara’s remake of a remake — namely Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on Don Siegel’s classically paranoid 1956 SF adaptation of Jack Finney’s effective novel The Body Snatchers — doesn’t match the Siegel original, though it’s a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman’s low-key, new-agey version. Kaufman shifted the action from a small California town to San Francisco, while Ferrara–shooting a script by Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John from a screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen — locates the action in an Army compound in Alabama. Read More »

Plot:Director Abel Ferrara applies his eccentric vision to the vampire genre with this cerebral “Art”film about graduate philosophy student Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), who is bitten by anaggressive female vampire (Annabella Sciorra) and soon spirals into a nightmarish world ofblood addiction and existential angst. Driven by her merciless condition, she attacks severalof her pretentious friends and classmates (even her professor) and mainlines their blood likeheroin. Just as she becomes more bold in seeking prey on the streets of New York, she iswaylaid by a potential victim — actually a sophisticated vampire himself named Peina(Christopher Walken), who chooses to control his own blood addiction through fasting andmeditation.Read More »