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There's a fine line between misleading an audience for effect and tricking them out of spite. M. Knight Shyamalan lost most of his credibility for the latter, but he's not the only filmmaker desperate to pull a fast one on jaded genre fans who think they can second-guess every twist and turn. The Conjuring and Insidious franchises both make a habit out of playing a cinematic shell game involving demonic possession with surprisingly good results. But Hong-jin Na's The Wailing (2016) does them all one better, shuffling angels, demons, sinners and saints until the audience is just as supernaturally suspicious as the characters in the film. When the residents of a small South Korean village begin killing each other - and themselves - the local police are in way over their heads, particularly Sgt. Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) whose general laziness and lack of ambition make the murders more of an inconvenience than a challenge. Rumors begin to spread about a Japanese newcome...

The '80s were a pretty forgiving era for horror movies. Computer graphics hadn't really made an impact yet so slimy prosthetics and latex molds lent everything a tangibly gooey fan appeal than resulted in some classic creatures features ( The Thing, Tremors ) and a whole lot of guilty pleasures. Slugs (1988) certainly falls in the latter category, built around a classic nature-run-amok scenario that isn't so far removed from enjoyable schlock like The Killer Shrews or The Food of the Gods . Director Juan Piquer Simon ( Pieces ) works from the novel by Shaun Hutson, providing some ridiculously squishy set piece scenes surrounded by standard small-town hysteria straight out of a '50s drive-in double-feature. Health Inspector Mike Brady (Michael Garfield) begins to suspect that something isn't right in his quiet community after a number of bodies turn up completely stripped down to the bone. When he gets nowhere with the mayor, who's focused on a big r...

In many ways, Nighthawks (1981) is the perfect transitional film from the more character-driven cop thrillers of the '70s to the shoot-first-ask-questions-later ideology of the '80s. In fact, the stated theme of the film - "Violence can only be fought with greater violence" - was embraced by an entire decade of filmmakers and action icons who molded the action movie into its current energetically excessive incarnation. And at the heart of it all is Sylvester Stallone who took over the troubled shoot after clashing with the original director and created a movie in his own image. Originally meant to focus on real-life international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, studio execs, fearful of theater bombings in reprisal, shifted the script to focus on a fictional Aryan substitute: Wulfgar Reinhardt (Rutger Hauer), so ruthless even his own organization has disowned him. Chased out of London, Wulfgar plans on making a big bang in New York where press coverage of his exploi...

James Cameron's The Abyss might be only a footnote in the director's career, wedged between installments of the Terminator and his record-breaking run with Titanic , but the short-lived buzz around its production inspired several other "underwater monster" flicks that rushed to beat it to the screen. And the crazy thing is, they did ! Thanks to the Abyss' 140-day shooting schedule and legendary production delays, movies like Leviathan and Deepstar Six were first into cinemas. And although they don't share much in common with Cameron's first-contact thriller, these quickie creature features have earned their fare share of fans since 1989. One year late to the party was The Rift (aka Endless Descent ), which was released straight-to-video in 1990, starring Jack Scalia as the designer of a sunken supersub who joins a rescue mission on its sister ship to retrieve the black box and find out what happened to the crew. But the rescue team soon find...

Low-budget horror hit a peak in the 70’s with films like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, breaking the barriers of good taste and the heretofore-predictable rules of scary movies audiences came to expect. These were the pioneers of the “anti-Hollywood” horror movie. While Hooper peaked with brief mainstream success as a director-for-hire on Spielberg's Poltergeist, Craven took the long road eventually getting his due with the Elm Street and Scream franchises. But he could never recapture the exploitation zeitgeist of his early work, especially The Hills Have Eyes, which tapped into an ugly mirror image of the American family that the director carried with him the rest of his career. The Carter family takes an ill-advised shortcut through an atomic test zone and winds up stranded in the middle of the desert. Their presence attracts the attention of a different sort of family altogether, inbred mutants who survive on human flesh and a...

There are robots and there are ro butts . That difference in pronunciation is quite profound within in the sci-fi genre; it's the difference between the childish escapism of Lost in Space and the complex social commentary of Star Trek , between the clunky metallic servants of Forbidden Planet and the rebellious cyborg slaves of Blade Runner . Simply put, ro- butts is a signifier of that innocent '50s take on the future when all humanity had to look forward to were matching jumpsuits and technology about as advanced as a Ford Pinto. So when it comes to The Shape of Things to Come , a sci-fi stinker from 1979, trust me when I say you can smell the butt coming a mile away! Ostensibly based on H.G. Well's novel of the same name, already adapted in eye-catching fashion once before in 1936 by William Cameron Menzies ( Invaders from Mars ), this version drifts out of the original material's orbit pretty quickly, aiming for a Star Wars escapist approach involving a ...

Blood Simple is easy to write-off as a calling card film. In fact, that's exactly what critic J. Hoberman of the Village Voice said in 1984, praising the film's style while dismissing it as a whole for being nothing more than a cinematic resume. He's right, of course, in recognizing the Coen brothers' ambition to kick-start their careers, raising money from private investors (a model their friend Sam Raimi used to finance The Evil Dead ) and shooting their low-budget noir thriller on the cheap in hopes of attracting some Hollywood attention. But dismissing the result of their efforts was a miscalculation as Blood Simple established a template that took the Coens all the way to the top of their profession. If that's just a resume, it's one hell of a good one! Ray and Abby (John Getz & Frances McDormand) are having an affair. To complicate the situation, Abby's husband, Marty (Dan Hedaya), is Ray's boss at a neon-soaked Texas honky-tonk. A...

With Arrow Video's release of Dead End Drive-In , we finally have director Brian Trenchard-Smith's most polished, professional film project on home video...only it's not actually Dead End Drive-In. Instead, it's a documentary short produced in 1978 as part of a public service campaign entitled Hospital's Don't Burn Down included as a bonus feature on Arrow's Blu-ray / DVD combo. No disrespect to the main feature, which Quentin Tarantino has anointed his favorite of the director's work, but in this case it's the extras which really make this collector's edition a must-buy. Set in a dystopian near future, Dead End Drive-In (1986) plays out in a Mad Max -style landscape where crime and unemployment have led to the imprisonment of youthful "undesirables" inside makeshift concentration camps created within a chain of drive-ins across the country. Crabs (Ned Manning) and Carmen (Natalie McCurry) are lured in and locked up with ...