Tag: occult
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Halloween Pick ‘n’ Mix: Shocker (1989) and The Blood Beast Terror (1968)
Surprisingly cheesy and dull Wes Craven thriller, Shocker is nowhere near as good as The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and his other classics. It’s about a young man pursued by a serial killer, Horace Pinker, who kills most of his adopted family, his girlfriend, and sundry other people in…
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Dracula AD 1972 (1972)
Dracula AD 1972 is one of the not fondly remembered Hammer films to star Christopher Lee as the eternal bloodsucker, the penultimate entry before The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) finally stuck a stake in the franchise’s heart. When AD came out it was widely panned and it seems to have retained its dire reception…
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Immaculate (2024)
You’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re in a glut of the sub-genre that is Catholic horror movies, after last year’s The Nun II (2023), the upcoming First Omen (2024), and now Immaculate, directed by Michael Mohan and written by Andrew Lobel. How about, for once, a horror movie where a couple of atheists sit…
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Night Swim (2024)
Well, I saw my first movie of 2024, Night Swim, and it was a dud, though not at least a painful one. It was a typical January horror film, though of the mediocre school as opposed to outright schlock. It tells a Stephen King-esque tale of a haunted swimming pool in the new backyard of…
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Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1972)
I just saw Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, the last of the local art centre’s choices for Classic Horror Nights, and it was a jewel, so to speak. Based loosely on The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker, most famous for Dracula, it utilises a lot of the elements of British and Hammer…
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The Uncanny (1977)
I just saw 1977’s The Uncanny, an anthology horror film starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance just prior to his role as Dr Loomis in Halloween, at my local art centre’s Classic Horror Nights and it was fantastic. Your mileage with it may vary, depending on your taste for camp and tolerance of cheese in…
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The Exorcist: Believer (2023)
What is it with David Gordon Green and vintage horror reboots? His first Halloween reboot (2018) was fine, probably the best of the Halloween sequels, but the others were trash and now we have this. Why has he gone from such worthy indie dramas as George Washington (2000) and All the Real Girls (2003) to…
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The Exorcist (1973): 50th anniversary Director’s Cut
By way of what I suppose is full disclosure, The Exorcist happens to be my favourite film. I’ve seen it on the big screen twice now, the first time two or three years ago and latterly for its 50th anniversary. It remains an utterly compelling motion picture, about faith and guilt and love, told through…
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A Haunting in Venice (2023)
I just saw A Haunting in Venice and it was first-class junk. I’m not sure what Kenneth Branagh’s motivation is to keep making these Poirot adaptations. He doesn’t seem to like the character much and from what I’ve read he’s not exactly making money hand over fist with them. His Murder on the Orient Express…
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Blood Feast (1963)
Described as the worst horror film he’s ever seen by Stephen King, Blood Feast is a notorious 1963 splatter film by celebrated schlockmeister and “godfather of gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis. I say “celebrated”. He’s discussed and referenced fondly by artists who cut their teeth on the sort of pulp trash that Lewis made his name…
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