DVD/Blu-ray Reviews

Believe it or not, the very first time actors Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing were in the same film together was in 1970 with Scream and Scream Again.  While only two of the three horror icons share screen time together, their appearance in this weird title ...

“Honey, look! I made a killing,” exclaims Beverly Sutphin as she marches hurriedly back to her daughter’s booth with a black fire poker in her hand.  She’s as clueless as she is psychotic and the hilariously long line of cop cars that follows her on the way to church is proof enough ...

Do I dare say it?  Do I dare suggest such blasphemy?  I do.  In my opinion, we’ve just witnessed the next evolution of horror with the release of The Void.  It is a film that matches, frame for frame, the otherworldly bizarreness and esoteric terror of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser ...

Director John Brahm knows how to create mood.  I praised his efforts in my reviews for The Lodger and The Undying Monster, but with Vincent Price in 1954’s The Mad Magician, he adds a new dimension to terror.  By mixing the 3D technology of the time period with shockingly ...

If you’ve read my article Five Beers: In Defense of the Trashier Side of Cinema, then you probably realize a documentary about the rise and fall of physical media is going to be close to my heart.  This is the territory of VHS Massacre: Cult Films and the Decline ...

I’m just going to go ahead and say (and spray) it everywhere.  Exploitation filmmaker Frank Henenlotter is one of the few remaining mad geniuses of the cinema; he’s a walking masterpiece of the b-movie.  Horror Hounds and Gore-Gore girls, this is what happens when  ...

Looking for a quick study of the attitude and overall swagger of the 1980s?  Few things are as tonally expressive AND summative as the opening few minutes of this flick when it comes to the 1980s heyday.  Look no further ...

I bet you probably didn’t know that Darth Vader made an appearance in another film shortly after the release of Return of the Jedi.  I also bet you didn’t know that a fat kid’s biggest fear is to be eaten by a double cheeseburger.  It’s all true.  Making Contact, an Amblin ...

While Bela Lugosi’s residency making poverty row pictures was relatively short-lived, there were a handful of solid horror titles he made that originally went ignored.  The Corpse Vanishes, doubling down on the genuine weirdness of an aging couple obsessed with  ...

It’s time to go back; back to the 1980’s.  It was a time when the videocassette ruled everything.  The sticker advising us to “Be Kind, Rewind” was stuck to every case.  Sometimes, we did and other times, well, we were kind of in a hurry to get the damn thing back to the video ...

Nail guns and cyborgs are always a deadly combination.  Ouch. Toward the end of the 1990s, there were a slew of disaster pictures concerning everything from the end of the freakin’ world to computers losing their shit.  It seemed that everyone wanted to weigh in on Y2K.  Off-screen ...

It was the first movie I ever saw in 3-D.  Friggin’ SpaceVision as I recall.  For that reason and others (involving the sheer joy of the flick), I freakin’ love director Lamont Johnson’s Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.  LOVE IT.  To me, it is Canuxploitation ...

Burn, baby, burn! Cannon Films, man.  What a run they had.  From American Ninja to Delta Force and beyond, for many a teenager growing up in the 1970s and the 1980s, they were the source for high-flying action.  I mean, who doesn’t love Stallone taking names and ...

"I love this game, Moonpie.  I love it." A dark arena fills the picture.  Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor fills our ears as two teams enter the rink.  The teams are Houston and Madrid and the game they are about to play is called Rollerball, a violent sport centered ...

To this day, there remains something insanely special about director Brian De Palma’s Carrie.  It is based on the once-discarded novel by Stephen King, but was painstakingly adapted for the screen by Lawrence D. Cohen.  Cohen got everything about King’s first novel right  ...