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Assigned the task of making " Jaws on land," director Elliot Silverstein brought up to studio executives the many challenges of trying to top Spielberg with a story about a demonic vehicle wreaking havoc in broad daylight in the desert...not the least of which was the fact that Spielberg already made it ! Four years before pitting Roy Scheider against a great white, the director had put Dennis Weaver in a similar position against an unstoppable semi-truck in Duel (1971), a made-for-TV movie that was released theatrically overseas to great success. The Car (1977) doesn't have one-tenth of the tension that made Duel great, but it's still fun in the way most forgettable B-movies are: taking a ridiculous scenario so seriously that one can't help but have a good time watching James Brolin and his deputies go head-to-head against forces they don't understand. And quite honestly, neither does anyone else! The Car doesn't even attempt to explain th...

Twins are creepy. With all due respect to real-life identical siblings, there's just something unnatural about two people looking exactly alike. As the filmmakers behind Goodnight Mommy (2014) explain, "You just can't trust them." Writer/director team Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala use this audience predisposition to maximum effect in their film which creates an almost Kubrickian sense of dread around the story of a mother whose twin boys suspect she's been replaced by an imposter after returning wrapped in post-cosmetic surgical bandages. Elias and Lukas live in their own sheltered world of secrets and adventures. Mother's reappearance (actress Susanne Wuest's character goes unnamed otherwise through the film) seems to set them off on a dangerous game as they first question her behavior, then her very identity ...leading to a disturbing torture session that is extremely difficult to watch. Goodnight Mommy is unsettling both in terms of cont...

Anthology films, as rare as they are throughout cinematic history, seem to fit most comfortably within the horror genre. Like campfire stories, they don't demand a complex narrative or fully developed characters to generate a good scare or unexpected twist. Amicus put out several memorable anthologies in the early '70s like Tales from the Crypt , George Romero and Stephen King knocked it out of the park with Creepshow in 1982, and we've even seen a surprising resurgence of late with Trick 'r Treat (2007) and the VHS films. Nightmares (1983) actually began life as a TV spinoff of ABC's Darkroom , a latter-day Twilight Zone hosted by James Coburn. With the show's cancellation Universal decided to push several discarded stories into theatrical development. There's really no cohesive theme at work, just a collection of four chapters that still seem more at home on the small screen than the large one. Terror in Topanga restages a common urban l...

Strange Invaders (1983) supposes that aliens landed in the small town of Centerville, Illinois in 1958, replaced the entire population, and has been living in a sort of zoological experiment ever since. Its residents are the cinematic descendents of Jack Finney's Body Snatchers , covering up the conspiracy at all costs and sucking the life out of interlopers like fleshy shrinky-dinks. The parallels with alien invasion films of the '50s are purposefully obvious. But director Michael Laughlin's is more than homage; it's as bizarre and left-of-center as the disguised residents of Centerville themselves. When his ex-wife disappears after a trip back to her mysterious hometown, Charles Bigelow (Paul Le Mat) drives from his New York apartment to the heartland of America to get the scoop. He's scared off by a welcoming committee that includes several unfriendly locals (including b-movie veteran Kenneth Tobey) and a bug-eyed alien that shoots lightning from its elongat...

Before their runaway success with The Sopranos and Game of Thrones , HBO struggled for years to build an identity as the home on pay-cable TV for compelling original program. Their first breakout success was Tales from the Crypt , a horror anthology series with a who's who of Hollywood producers and directors (Richard Donner, Walter Hill, Joel Silver, David Giler and Robert Zemeckis) championing the "not-safe-for-broadcast-television" Grand Guignol storytelling. While there was a strong emphasis on humor over horror, the series, which ran for seven seasons, attracted a great deal of A-list talent and even inspired two feature-film spinoffs. The first, Demon Knight (1995), actually jettisons most of the tongue-in-cheek style of the show (except for those terrible Crypt Keeper intros) and focuses instead on action-horror thrills with an ensemble cast of characters fighting off the physical and psychological attacks of the Collector (Billy Zane), a disguised demon who...