Movieline Online

A pop-music confection of psychic powers, first love, and invaders from Venus, 1981’s School in the Crosshairs is a mainline rush of anime aesthetics and pre-MTV aspirations. And if you think that’s a mouthful, wait’ll you get a look at the film itself! Director Nobuhiko Obayashi ( House ) stacks plot devices like Jenga pieces, relying on the charisma of super-producer Haruki Kadokawa’s handpicked pop princess to keep it from collapsing under its own weight. That secret ingredient is star Hiroko Yakushimaru, the cherub-faced schoolgirl who’d break out later that same year in Sailor Suit and Machine Gun . Here she plays Yuka, the most popular girl in school, who discovers her telekinetic abilities have drawn the attention of a power-hungry alien bent on enslaving her fellow students. With help from a mysterious new girl on campus, the villains drain all the fun from Daii Academy, transforming it into a fascist state devoted entirely to academics.   Based on an oft-adapted novel by ...

John Carpenter had already tackled a Stephen King adaptation (the under-appreciated Christine ), so he was on familiar ground with In the Mouth of Madness (1995), an H.P. Lovecraft inspired tale about a best-selling horror writer whose work seems to be bending the reality of his avid readers. Sam Neill stars as John Trent, a cynical insurance investigator sent into the wilds of New England to track down the reclusive author and recover his final novel. However, what he finds is the fictional town of Hobb's End (think Castle Rock or Dunwich) has popped up in some inter-dimensional crevasse, a gateway between our world and that of the "Old Ones," a menagerie of monsters who grow stronger with each new reader. And the movie comes out next month! Written by New Line executive - and horror fan - Michael De Luca, In the Mouth of Madness is a dark but playful journey through Lovecraft Country, blending slimy practical effects and more outré imaginative flourishes well-suite...

It’s hard to justify the artistic value behind every exploitation flick that unspooled on 42 nd  street in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  Especially when you’re dealing with the “rape- revenge” genre.  Movies like  I Spit on Your Grave  (1978) were vilified, despite their eventual female empowerment, for depicting sexual assault for the sake of titillation, although this was rarely ever the case.  Regardless, it’s not a subject matter to which most “normal” people are anxious to subject themselves.   Abel Ferrara’s  Ms. 45  covers the same dangerous ground, forcing its central character and the audience to endure two rapes within the first 10 minutes.  But the movie that follows is quite unlike any other grindhouse thriller in history: a morally ambiguous, socially deviant, psychologically damaging masterpiece of street-level independent filmmaking.   Shot during the “disco sucks” era in New York City, Ferrara’s camera...

Although  Outland  (1981) isn’t officially part of the  Alien  or  Blade Runner  universe, but it’s certainly cut from the same cloth.  Director Peter Hyams blue-collar space odyssey shares the same “truckers in space” visual aesthetic, trapping its characters in a corporate-funded indentured servitude that doesn’t look much more appealing than a Pennsylvania coal mine…and is actually  whole   lot  more dangerous. Set on a mining facility on one of Jupiter’s moons, Sean Connery stars as Marshall William O’Niel, assigned to keep the peace on an installation that seems to be having more accidents than usual.  What clues he can turn up point to a conspiracy headed by Sheppard (Peter Boyle), whose work-hard, play-hard philosophy is turning his employees into drug addicted time bombs. Outnumbered and outgunned, O’Niel is targeted for death by a hit squad arriving on the next shuttle with a countdown straight out of  High N...

The two anthologies that make up  Three  and  Three… Extremes  twist the horror genre into something that  feels more existential than supernatural…although there are plenty of lost souls floating around too.  Each short (three in each, hence the title) finds its director taking on a cinematic dare: how beautiful and grotesque can things be at the same time? Jumping from Japan to Korea to Thailand to Hong Kong, Asian horror goes places Hollywood fears to tread and these six films are a fascinating tour into unfamiliar territory.     Three  (2002) starts off quietly with Kim Jee-woon’s  Memories , turning marital amnesia into something like a fuzzy purgatory of guilt, regret and sorrow…with a little murder thrown in for good measure. Nonzee Nimibutr’s  The Wheel  fits comfortably in folk horror territory, mixing cursed puppets, jealousy and greed for the most rural outsider of the bunch. But things get urban again...

The beautiful practicality of horror films is that they require very few resources:  a cabin in the woods, some fake fog, clever camera angles and a used mask from the sporting goods store and you’re ready to roll.  This isn’t meant as an insult, it’s part of what makes the genre so accessible.  But it’s also what makes  The Last Horror Film  (1982) such an outlier in the crowded slasher-giallo category.  Shot on location during the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, director David Winters uses the glitz and glamour of the actual event as the backdrop for his  Taxi Driver -inspired tale of audience obsession and industry backstabbing. Reuniting stars Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro from 1980’s  Maniac , the film follows Vinny, a deranged New York cabbie and wannabe filmmaker who travels to Cannes to track down his favorite scream queen, Jana Bates. Armed with a camera, delusions of grandeur, and an unhealthy attachment to his mothe...

Slasher films were a dime a dozen in the mid-‘80s. Wannabe franchise villains were popping out of video games, movie screens and 976 numbers to steal some of Jason and Freddy’s box office mojo. But 1985’s The Island , a Hong Kong production, hearkens back to the ‘70s era of horror family fare…meaning inbred maniacs looking for a new addition to the group photo. Using the films of Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven as a template, director Po-Chih Leong delivers an anything-goes thriller that’s party comedy, part torture-porn and all Hong Kong. An inexperienced teacher brings his troublesome students along on a two-day excursion where they’re greeted by the island’s only residents: a trio of troubled brothers with designs on the available females. After a matchmaking attempt is rejected, pitchforks, machetes and various pointy objects come into play as the brothers decide to recruit a new bride by any means necessary. Odd in a way only Hong Kong movies can be, The Island jumps from Last Hous...

The iconography of classic horror films from the West is comforting in its familiarity: tilted headstones in a foggy graveyard, musty castle corridors and laboratories full of inexplicable equipment. But this library of imagery wasn’t completely universal (pun intended). In fact, Japanese horror, despite leaning on American and British tropes, built their monster universe on homegrown legends inhabiting a landscape of bamboo forests and spooky swamps, phantasms that stalked their victims in silhouette behind a translucent paper screens. Daiei Gothic: Volume Two collects three more films that explore the bizarre and pleasantly unfamiliar world of Japanese horror. Demon of Mount Oe  (1960) is the most formalized film in the trio. A loose retelling of the Shuten-dōji legend, it fuses period samurai adventure with a parade of grotesque monsters that feel equal parts mythic, psychedelic and kaiju-inspired…not to mention all the disembodied heads! It’s as if Kurosawa had been handed ...

Like your favorite snack, it’s hard to watch just one Shaw Brothers movie. They seem to go down best in bunches, particularly when someone else does the curating for you. And that’s exactly what you get in Eureka’s latest set,   Furious Swords and Fantastic Warriors: The Heroic Cinema of Chang Cheh   — five discs, ten movies, and a blistering amount of kung fu, wuxia, and, for something a little different, staged musical action. Disc one focuses on the Shaolin cycle with   The Men from the Monastery   and   Shaolin Martial Arts . The first film is a convoluted collection of chapters that never quite gel, introducing historical characters who figure prominently in the Shaw Brothers fantasy universe. This mix of facts, famous warriors, and timelines plays out better in the next film, which adds a touch of romance to the typical plot of two acolytes mastering special skills to defend their temple. Disc two pairs   King Eagle   and   Iron Bodyguard ....

Before the Italians turned cannibalism into grisly cinematic joke there was Raw Meat (1972), Gary Sherman's underground people-eater movie that mixes elements of expected Grand Guignol with an oh-so-British sense of pathos and restraint. And its relative obscurity over the years has only enhanced its reputation as a less visceral take on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when actually the two films share very little in common. Sherman's film is more polished, more structured, more procedural in approach. But it never quite achieves the demented level of insanity of Tobe Hooper's work. Other than a penchant for human flesh, each director has a different end game in mind. Making their way home on a late London subway, Alex and Patricia come upon a dying man slumped over the steps. Alex, a callous American abroad, suggests they ignore the incident but Patricia insists they return with help. Once they arrive with a constable, the man, who turns out to be a high-ranking governm...