Movieline Online

If you’re interested you can follow Fulci’s trail of blood right on into The House by the Cemetery . Released just a year after The Shining , Fulci’s film lifts many of the same spook house ingredients: blank-faced kid with psychic visions, creepy ghost girls, and (due to budgetary constraints, I’m sure) a small stream of blood rather than a service elevator. I’ll try for a synopsis, but early ‘80s Italian horror paid about as much attention to their plots as a five-year-old in advanced algebra class. It’s not that narrative logic was beyond him, but Fulci seemed to be competing toe-to-toe with rival Dario Argento ( Suspiria ) to see who could make the most non-sensical horror film. House comes awful close to winning the prize; blending ghosts, zombies and mad-scientists with several set-piece gross out effects. An over-the-top bat attack shows exactly how entertaining poor dubbing, rubber wings and gallons of fake blood can be! Blue Underground’s new Blu-ray edition is so scrubb...

Fulci Lives! Never heard the expression? Attend any horror convention across the country you’ll see more T-shirts with this slogan than mullets at a rodeo. That’s because Lucio Fulci, the Italian director behind Zombie, really knows how to impale an eyeball. Zombie is, if not the director’s most accomplished film, certainly his most bankable thanks to the pseudo-sequel tie-in with Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Fulci, though, doesn’t waste his time with social satire or dark comedy but gets right down the bloody business of loosing his zombie horde on the world (or at least, the parts he can afford the location costs). The film opens with a very effective Nosferatu image of an abandoned sailboat drifting into New York harbor. Well, almost abandoned. On board is a decomposing but dangerous zombie escapee from a mysterious South Seas island. This discovery prompts a couple of amateur sleuths – actors Tisa Farrow (Mia’s sister) and Ian McCulloch (not the Echo and Bunnymen singer) – to track d...

OK, I’ll admit it. A 100-foot-tall, firebreathing Japanese turtle isn’t really scary by anyone’s standards. But you’ll be surprised just how effective director Shuseke Kaneko’s ‘90s Gamera trilogy is at realistically staging Godzilla-scale destruction without all the unintentional humor. Particularly the third film, Revenge of Iris , which focuses on the real emotional aftermath of all that monster mashing. A young girl whose parents were killed during one of Gamera’s previous battles finds and raises an orphaned monster with the intent on getting revenge. Very rarely does a kaiju film (Japanese for “monster movie”) even acknowledge that its creatures are responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, let alone build an entire script around the idea. Iris does this with such skill you almost forget you’re watching men in rubber suits. All three films are now out in a handsome Blu-ray box set that you can get on the cheap.

For years, I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen that Evil Dead 2 (1987) is one of the most influential movies of the last 30 years. Like Citizen Kane (yep, I just went there) it showed an entire generation of filmmakers that they could do anything with a movie camera. No tripod, no problem! Just tape the darn thing down on a plank of wood and start shooting. Sam Raimi’s film proved that in the videotape era, the rules of traditional Hollywood filmmaking no longer applied. No one learned that lesson better than Peter Jackson, starting with his underground New Zealand horror productions and culminating with his most unlikely Academy Award sweep in 2004. Dead Alive (his third feature) is a variant on the Evil Dead horror-comedy formula, only with an emphasis on gore and special effects that makes Raimi’s film look like an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba . And it’s most certainly not for everyone. It’s easy to spot Jackson’s talent; he gives the camera free reign to swoop, spin...

Although his career is now Hollywood limbo, you have to give M. Knight Shyamalan credit for delivering the most original ghost story is the past 20 years. It’s easy to scare folks with loud noises and cheap gags, but The Sixth Sense got under your skin with its mix of the supernatural and the spiritual . Which is exactly what The Presence attempts to do, it its own misguided way. Mira Sorvino plays a psychologically scarred writer who isolates herself in a cabin to work on her book deal with her own childhood trauma. But - as the audience is made aware of in the first shot - she shares this space with an uncommunicative spirit (Shane West) who seems equally trapped in his own depressing after-life. Director Tom Provost takes the risky (but ultimately rewarding) approach of shooting his ghost as if he’s just another character in the room. Which makes it all the more jarring when another spirit arrives, one that seems to be whispering nasty thoughts into our heroine’s ear. The P...

As John Carpenter tells it, he was up all night in front of a typewriter trying to come up with some ideas for the contractually obligated sequel to his super successful slasher movie, Halloween . Several hours and half a bottle of whisky later, Laurie Strode was revealed to be Michael Meyers’ sister , explaining exactly why she seemed to be the target of on his homicidal bender through Haddonfield. Carpenter would be the first to admit the whole thing was scarier without an explanation (see Rob Zombie’s horrendous remakes if you need further clarification), but his slightly inebriated plot point works as well as any. The director didn’t return, but Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance and director of photography Dean Cundey did , which means the films looks and feels like a direct continuation of Carpenter’s work. The spooky suburban streets, however, are soon replaced by the sterile corridors of Haddonfield Memorial Hospital where Laurie is admitted as the only survivor of the Mic...

It ironic how much effort Scream 4 puts into critiquing the irrelevancy of all the remakes, re-imaginings and rip-offs of horror classics in recent years, when the franchise itself has been irrelevant for more than a decade. The Wes Craven / Kevin Williamson creation was never as smart as it thought it was to begin with. It’s a lot tougher to make something scary than it is to mock something that’s not. And yet there’s something oddly reassuring about this fourth chapter, which attempts to comment on Facebook (“I don’t want friends, I want fans ,” confesses the killer when finally revealed), Twitter, and an entire generation so out of touch with reality that a live streaming feed is the closest they get to a personal interaction. There’s plenty of material to work with, but the film’s formula remains predictably routine: clever intro, smart-ass teenagers, prank calls, several red herrings and that corny Ghostface mask. But it’s great to see time spent on Courtney Cox and David ...