Monster Mayhem

Thrill Me! Writer/Director Fred Dekker is a hero of mine when it comes to making memorable films.  From Night of the Creeps to Monster Squad, Dekker has created some of my all-time favorites.  It would be hard to imagine my upbringing ...

Meteor shit!  Fuck-a-diddle!  Creepshow lands with a brand-new SteelBook edition which faithfully recreates its original art! Loaded with highly quotable lines and scary-ass scenes full of corpses and maggots as fathers come back rom the dead, the titanic team-up of writer Stephen King and ...

What movie? You didn’t tell me about any movie!  The meta is strong in the remake of The Blob.  Too bad this remake often gets ignored by snobs because this version gets a lot of things about remakes damn right.  There is a lot to love about this flick and, believe it or not, we owe it all to Freddy  ...

While this prolonged season of cold - full of icy chills - still holds a tight and frigid grip over most of America this year, it seems certainly appropriate to embrace the gothic nature of winter with a really good classic monster film and bury our heads under the warm covers of safety when moments  ...

When is a monster not a monster?  When it is a Universal monster.  Every single one of Universal’s famed horror output posits would-be monsters as misunderstood creations whose intentions are . . . innocent enough. From Dracula’s will to survive to The Wolf Man’s dreaded curse, these  ...

“Did it ever occur to you that beneath the superficial you’ve learned about, there could be a great and passionate devotion to this god?” When it comes to The Mummy, few films have delivered anything close to Universal’s original 1932 film with Boris Karloff in the role of Imhotep, an ancient  ...

“It’s alive! It’s alive!” Thanks to the glorious electrical effects of Kenneth Strickfaden, most viewers know the key sequence in Frankenstein in which the mad Henry Frankenstein (a tremendous performance from Colin Clive) brings his stitched-together creation of random human ...

Frankenstein will never die.  Know this. While some form of the monster may come and go, the mad scientist responsible for all his carnage will never completely disappear.   Hammer’s final moments with their first incarnation of his evil, gloriously played by Peter Cushing, might have sent him to the gallows pole but, deep down inside, all of us knew that it wasn’t really the end of his  ...

“I am Dracula. I bid you welcome.” In which the Universal Monsters film series moves away from the silent era and legitimately begins!  Pre-Code Horror doesn’t get any better than here with Producer Carl Laemmle’s Dracula, a film which is often overlooked by some disciples ...

It’s a deadly game of bat and mouse!!! The steady beat.  The blistering horns.  That powerful theme of James Bernard’s pierces the walls of this cemetery; it is majestic even.  It sounds like a procession as the camera marches us toward the tomb of Dracula.  And then, because we’d not have it any other way, there is a sprinkling of ...