Movieline Online

When the front cover shows a picture of a six-seater passenger plane being attacked by some multi-tentacled space octopus, the odds are not in your favor. Not that there’s anything wrong with the idea of a space octopus per se (in fact, it’s downright exciting!) but direct-to-DVD too often means direct-to-SyFy Channel…right between to Mansquito and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus . But Altitude is one ambitious little flick. It has to rise above a cast straight out of your favorite “dead teenager” movie, a script that comes dangerously close to copyright infringement of Stephen King’s The Langoliers , and, to top it off, traps the audience inside that tiny puddle-jumper of a plane for the entire running time! But first-time director Kaare Andrews (a Marvel Comic writer and illustrator) turns it all into an exercise in B-movie Hitchcock thrills and chills. The aforementioned space octopus is kept off-screen for the most part, but it’s eventual appearance actually lives up to the ar...

The Exorcist tops most people’s scary movie lists, but if you asked them I’m not sure they could say why. After all, the film is more than 30 years old (well, past the expiration date for most contemporary audiences). It doesn’t feature a “franchise” killer good for twenty sequels. Loose ends are everywhere, characters pop in and out and the music features more keyboards than A Flock of Seagulls concert. But here’s the thing about The Exorcist : it’s a movie that could never be made today. Studio executives would burn the script. Audiences would picket the theaters. It’s simply too provocative to be created in today’s PC obsessed society. That alone makes it something in an anomaly of the horror genre, which only seems to get bloodier as time goes on. Director William Friedkin was way ahead of the curve in terms of treating his supernatural subject matter with a documentarian’s eye (something Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch took to the extreme). The film may be old fa...

There was a time when New York City was dangerous, both in the physical and moral sense. A time when hookers were more common than rich housewives with dogs stuffed in their purses. When Times Square was a place to get cheap thrills, not cheap TVs and discount merchandise. The cinema of the ‘70s captured this very well (perhaps none better than Scorsese’s Taxi Driver ), but William Lustig’s Maniac is a worthy document of NYC’s sordid past, a surprising psychological profile and a down ‘n dirty exploitation movie to boot. Joe Spinell plays serial killer Frank Zito as a tortured soul, driven to murder by the memory of his prostitute mother. The fact that his character evokes sympathy despite the atrocity of his crimes (expertly and gruesomely executed by Tom Savini, who also has a small role) is a testament to both Lustig’s direction and Spinell’s performance. By all rights Maniac should have been simply another Halloween clone (it was certainly advertised as such) but instead...

Of all the horror icons created in the ‘80s, Freddy Krueger had the most potential. Wes Craven’s original Nightmare on Elm Street gave its serial dream stalker an endless amount of unconscious scrap material with which to do his dirty work. He could pop up in bathtubs, under the bed, inside your television…even French kiss you through the phone! Eight up-and-down sequels later, we get yet another boring “reimagining,” I guess because kids today won’t watch anything made before 1990. Too bad for them, because this slick but lifeless remake doesn’t have an ounce of imagination. What it does have is a couple of good actors: the new “Nancy,” Rooney Mara, (soon to be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ) and Jackie Earl Haley who gets the impossible task of replacing Robert Englund. Haley’s make-up, although much more believable, never allows the actor to emote with fiendish glee, an essential aspect of the Freddy persona. A deleted ending sans make-up shows what Haley might have brou...