John Carpenter’s The Fog was released in February of 1980 but the story takes place in April 21st 1980, the 100th Anniversary of the small Town of Antonio Bay. So with Today being the 21st of April it seemed like a good time to go back and pay tribute to this great film!

After the success of Halloween Carpenter decided to take on the classic ghost story after seeing a distant fog bank while on vacation one night. That planted the seed that would become The Fog. The film is about the small seaside town of Antonio Bay that’s about to celebrate their 100th anniversary. However the anniversary mysteriously falls on the same anniversary as the sinking of the Elizabeth Dane, a clipper ship that followed a false fire on the shore to their doom and crashed on the rocks and sunk taking the entire crew with her.

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Why do people seem to like this movie? There’s been some positive reviews from some horror sites that I thought should have known better. The first Laid to Rest is a passable slasher flick with bad acting, a interesting killer and amazing gore effects. While its nothing to write home about it is a fairly fun film though far from a great one. So I finally got around to watching the sequel and Its like a completely different movie. The killer somehow survives the end of the first film and is picked up by an shadowy organization of people that seem to be there solely to support Chromeskull with his mission. Apparently the company motto is: Step 1 Kill people, Step 2 ?, and Step 3 profit. Its never really clear why this organization exists or why its supporting ChromeSkull. The lead douche CEO is terrible actor, Brian Austen Green who wants to take over ChromeSkull’s place and be head of the organization for some reason. Danielle Harris is along just to egg on Green to be the top killer.

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So Bloody Disgusting.com has released a Spanish language film called Atrocious. I’d heard some good things about it and was more than a little interested in seeing it. BD has a bit of a reputation as one of the best sites for horror movie news so if they are getting behind this film is must be something cool right? No, not so much. Atrocious is a boring Blair Witch knock off with less woods and more house with a big twist ending that when finally revealed will make you say: “oh, that’s kinda neat I guess..”

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The 2011 Remake to the 80′s classic Fright Night went up against a lot of criticism when it came out earlier this year. There were a lot of horror bloggers that outright hated it and backed it up by accusing it of not pandering enough to the original and its fans. Having finally gotten the chance to see the film today I can honestly say without hesitation that Fright Night (2011) is a fun, fast paced, and funny horror film that I very much enjoyed. I’ve been a big fan of the original film and it truly is a movie of its time. Its filled with 80′s horror movie staples such as over the top special effects, scene chewing villains, and homages to the golden age of horror. Last summer I watched the original with some friends my age that had never seen it. While they liked it they thought it was very silly and unintentionally funny. And it is all those things but its still beloved and sacred to most horror fans.

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Last night my friends from Beyond The Grave Productions invited me out to see the premiere of an independent horror flick called ‘The Sleeper’. Jon Shroyer did all the gore F/X work on the film and was bringing us as his guests so I was pretty excited to see his work on the big screen. We went to a great little Theatre in Columbus called the Grandview Theater that looked and felt like a throwback to the 80′s and it perfectly fit the mood of the whole evening.

Recently we’ve seen quite the resurgence of retro-horror films. It started with the Grindhouse movies and now its moved into the 80′s slashers that I grew up on. However there hasn’t been too many that truly understood why 80′s slasher flicks worked. I’m seen some terrible films that think all you need is bad acting, gory kills and and masked killer. But some filmmakers do get 80′s horror, such as the amazing film House of the Devil by Ti West that looks and feels like a lost gem from the 80′s. Justin Russell, the director of The Sleeper truly gets how and why those movies worked and he’s made a film that comes close to being a truly great and fun 80′s slasher movie!

The movie is a riff on films like Black Christmas, House on Sorority Road and He knows Your Alone. Girls getting knocked off one by one in a Sorority House by an killer who uses a hammer and some other tools he finds laying around. The survivor girl, June, is portrayed as the girl next door who’s kind of shy and wants to move out of her dorm and into a Sorority for the remainder of her time in college. She goes to the Alpha Gamma Theta house party and decides to pledge for the sorority. In typical slasher movie fashion the girls start dropping off one by one in the house. But this killer likes to call the sorority house to let them know, a la Black Christmas, who’s going to get killed next before each kill.

Its typical slasher movie boilerplate stuff but where The Sleeper is different is in its cinematography and the eye of its director. The camera takes its time and it often voyeuristic, director Russell knows that to build tension you have to build up to the kills and while he isn’t successful on every kill in accomplishing this he certainly tries harder than most Hollywood slasher films do today. There’s a scene that takes place in a large auditorium where June is hiding. The Killer comes in and takes his time walking around the auditorium hitting his hammer on the seats as he passes them. The scene plays out with no music and it ends in a staple of 80′s slasher cheese that the audience I saw it with just ate up.

The music is credited to “Gremlin” and is very much inspired by the scores done by the Italian group Goblin for lots of 80′s Italian slasher films. The music fits the feel and look of the film perfectly and often repeats itself in true 80′s fashion. At the Q&A after the film I believe Russell said that he was Gremlin but it was too hard to hear him at times so I may be mistaken.

Our friend Jon Shroyer did the effects for the film and before the film began said that he was told to make them seem like somewhat cheesy 80′s effects and while I think he made them look a lot better than most 80′s effects I saw in the day, I understood what the director was going for. The effects are gruesome at times but always over the top and fun! There’s a awesome decapitation, complete with animatronic head that was the highlight of the film.

The film has some flaws that keep it from being a perfect retro-slasher but its mostly just pacing problems and only in a few spots where it just needed to be tightened up. The other stuff; bad acting, bad dancing, plot holes etc are all things that so added to movie and made it what it was meant to be! Its one of the few retro-slashers that manages to embody what makes a great slasher film. It never takes itself too seriously and it knows how to be suspenseful and fun! Its definitely worth checking out when it hits DVD!

On a side note the Grandview Theatre where this movie played was a amazing place! It looks like so many theaters I went to in the 80′s, before the multiplexes. I learned that they do Special screening of horror films and older films on a regular basis. Visit their site to Check them out if you live in the Columbus Area!

Update 1/28/12
The Sleeper is now out on DVD! Click below to get it from Amazon

So when I saw the previews and poster for Insidious I thought it looked interesting but probably not worth heading out to the multiplex to catch. But then I had 2 or 3 clients email to tell me to go and see it. I wasn’t convinced it was scary but I thought I better check it out.

The film begins with a slow pan from a light fixture to a bathroom mirror with a old scary woman standing in the reflection with a candle then the title comes up in a flickering old school, universal monsters type logo with screeching violins playing over top. Less than a minute in and I was already thinking this was going to be something special!

The film opens with a young couple, Josh and Renai, moving into a new home with their 3 kids’ two young boys and a baby girl. Almost immediately weird sounds begin happening, and Renai begins seeing and hearing people in the house. Their oldest son Dalton goes to investigate a noise in the attic and ends up falling from a ladder. He then sees something off screen that makes him scream. By the time his parents reach he’s just nursing a bump on his head from the fall. Everything seems fine but the next morning he’s in a coma that the doctors can’t explain.

That sets up our story where the parents try to cope with having a special needs child while living in a haunted house. However all of this is just what sets up the story and a clever way to really get us to care about these characters, something very few ghost stories manage to do.

While living in the house the characters experience some truly terrifying haunted experiences. Strange noises occur, whispers in the dark, alarms going off and all the trappings of a typical haunting. Where movies like A Haunting in Connecticut fail miserably, Insidious thrives. its strongest moments are the way it sets up the scares, everything from the sound design to the direction of the actors is perfect in setting the build up and when the ghost or whatever it might be appears, you’ll jump or at the very least feel those shivers run up your spine!

Eventually Josh and Renai decide to move out of the house, thinking that’s the issue. They move into a more modern and smaller home only to have things start happening again. The hauntings start up again in a very spooky sequence in broad daylight that uses Tiny Tim’s Rendition of “Tip Toe Through the Tulips”. It’s crazy, but, Somehow it all works!
The film builds to a big showdown with the entity that is haunting their child. This is almost always the part where I shut down on ghost story movies. The reason has always been the same, it becomes too hokey with religious BS exorcisms or ends with some giant CGI showdown that is just silly and uninteresting. However, Insidious almost manages to avoid all of these problems. The solution is still metaphysical and a little hard to swallow but the actors manage to make it believable even when it could have become silly.

Horror royalty, Lin Shaye plays the “psychic” that comes in to help the family. Usually the introduction of the psychic is when things go down the toilet in these types of movies but Shaye plays the part so warmly that we slowly get lulled into her character and believe what she has to say. Her fellow investigators are two “ghost hunters” using EMF detectors and old school film cameras to capture evidence. Both are a little eccentric and more than a little scared by what they find in the house. They act as a welcome comic relief by the time they make their somewhat awkward appearance into the proceedings.
I have to say that this was one of the few times I can think of when it comes to ghost story films that I wasn’t let down by the ending. It does get silly in its explanations but overall the movie pulled me and and I walked out a happy camper. Director James Wan, and writer Leigh Whannel are both responsible for Saw, but Insidious is everything that Saw wasn’t. It’s a slow, scary ghost story that actually works! The way the ghost sequences are filmed is very effective and even during a sequence where Josh is trying to find his son in some kind of “further” or ghost world, the tension is always there.

Insidious really surprised me and reminded me that ghost story films don’t have to be “Found footage” to work. Which is a little ironic since Oren Peli, the creator of Paranormal Activity, acted as a producer on Insidious. It’s a movie that really should be experienced in a theater to truly feel it. It does owe a lot to Poltergeist which is what it most reminded me of, however I always hated the ending to Poltergeist because of all the special effects. When you take the subtle scares that people are most familiar with away and through a bunch of effects at me then it takes me completely out of the film. Its no longer scary its just a bunch of special effects jumping at the screen. Insidious almost avoids this and manages to at least keep up the tension through to the end of the film.

It’s worth noting that at a budget of just 1 Million, this film is considered a low budget movie and has made back over 40 Million so far making it a huge success. It proves one simple fact that Hollywood seems to have forgotten: It doesn’t take 100 million or more to make a great and fun movies!

One of the best shows on TV these days is Fringe and its in danger of being canceled this year despite its loyal fan base. Why? Well not enough people are watching, plain and simple. The show is an intelligent sci-fi procedural that demands a bit more of its audience than insipid happy crap like Glee or whatever Reality show is popular now. The other problem is the show started out of the gate very weak 3 years ago. In fact I gave up on the first season after 3 or 4 episodes because it never seemed to rise above being a less plausible and more intellectual version of the X-Files. I got bored and walked away until my mom, of all people, told me the show was getting really good with this alternate universe storyline. So I gave it another chance and fell head over heals in love with it. The writing had become top notch, the storyline felt like it had a lot of momentum going forward and the characters were much deeper.

Now the show is in its third season and despite having a very interesting storyline regarding a battle between our universe and another parallel universe, the show has been struggling for ratings. Its produced by JJ Abrams who brought us the latest Star Trek and of course Lost but Abrams and Co. apparently learned something from Lost and have given Fringe a very real storyline with a goal at the end. Each week I look forward to watching this show because it never ceases to entertain and surprise me with where it goes and I love that! It can be a bit tough to jump into though so brushing up on Wikipedia or the like might be a good way to catch up before watching your first episode but its a rewarding series and it deserves more viewers. Its one of the few shows on Television today thats consistenly intelligent, funny, scary, and surprising and you should be watching it!

Fringe airs Fridays at 9PM on FOX. The next New Episode airs this Friday!

After a very, very, bumpy start Supernatural’s 6th, I might add unnecessary, season is finally finding its legs and pulling together a new arc that is starting to hold some interest. (SPOILERS AHEAD) The first 2 episodes of the season set up Sam’s return from Hell and the return of Sam and Dean’s long dead grandfather which I still don’t understand. In addition to that we got a handful of characters from the Campbell clan that are too boring and unremarkable to even recall. Then finally Sam and Dean got back together and started hunting again and things started to look up. Then Last week we got the excellent Bobby centered episode where the boys finally stopped whining long enough to help Bobby get his soul back. It was a darkly sweet episode directed by Dean himself, Jensen Ackles, and put Kenny Rogers song “the Gambler” to excellent use.

Last night was probably the best of the Season so far. We were treated to a vampire episode that offered a very funny and scathing look at vampires using the whole Twilight craze to get new victims. There’s some great jokes that had me rolling the first half of the episode. But then things take a dark path when Dean gets infected by a vamp and Sam lets it happen. Only we discover later that apparently Sam doesn’t mind endangering his brother’s life in order to find out what the vampires are up to. This was a plot point that surfaced in the first episode of the season and at first it just felt like role-reversal where Sam becomes like Dean used to be and vice a versa. However now this is starting to get more interesting as is the whole monsters arc the season has taken thus far. I’m finally beginning to look forward to watching this show each week once again.

The secondary story with Dean’s girlfriend and her son has been a strange one. I like both these characters a lot and I feel like there’s a hell of a lot more they could be doing with them instead of just relegating them to being Deans crutch. I’d like to see a strong female character come out of this show that I don’t despise or feel is miscast, and Lisa I think is that character. The son was so much like Dean when we met him 3 years ago and now that plot point has been apparently thrown out. I really don’t want to see them just sweep these 2 characters aside and pretend they never happened but that might be exactly where they’re going with it. The characters are getting older and I like seeing Dean care about someone other than just Sam. Lisa could be a very strong character if they develop her the right way. Please Supernatural writers don’t just kill this one off!