No Telling (1991)

No Telling essentially answers the question, what if PETA made a Frankenstein movie? But it’s so much more that that. Sure there’s the ethical question about whether lab experiments on animals is actually okay—as long as it leads to beneficial medicine? But more importantly, No Telling is extremely well directed by Larry Fessenden with nice swooping camera movements that don’t trip over the shoestring budget. Fessenden also uses a stopped car on the highway to illuminate the spatial distance between a married couple before they relocate to a remotely idyllic farmstead. So what’s the horror

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Horror,

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Parents (1989)

Parents did not fare well when landed in theaters back in 1989, receiving so-so reviews and bombing at the box office. Thankfully, time has been kinder to Bob Balaban‘s dark cannibal comedy. For years, the film was shuffled around on DVD double features and horror collections, but in the meantime, it became a cult classic and finally got a Blu-ray release early this year. Hopefully, that means Parents will get a boost in popularity because the twisted satire juxtaposes suburban 1950s Americana and macabre flesh-eating violence to distinctly delightful results. Parents stars Bryan Madorsky

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Comedy, Horror, Mystery,

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Eating Raoul (1982)

There’s a certain subset of cinephile culture that has deemed Eating Raoul a classic — heck, it even earned a spot in the Criterion Collection. And I don’t disagree with them. But despite the love from movie diehards, the horror comedy has remained a woefully underappreciated genre gem. To be sure, Eating Raoul skews further in the direction of comedy than horror (a fine counterpart to the twisted terrors of Parents, which you’ll find below), and the movie is light on gore, but it’s a pitch-perfect entry in the horror comedy lineage that hinges on the tropes of terror to land the punchline.

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Comedy, Crime, Films, Reviews,

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Bloody Moon (1981)

Jess Franco is most famous for Vampyros Lesbos and his modern swingin’ Euro adaptations of Marquise de Sade’s sadistic seductions—but Bloody Moon is his most straightforward horror film. There’s a killer on the loose at a Spanish schoolhouse, five years after a rape and murder at a party. And because it’s Franco, there’s also some body disfigurement and incest. The script is pretty ludicrous and the acting is pretty bad, but it never aims much higher than trashy kills and pearl-clutching plot mentions which is Franco’s sweet spot. It’s the perfect midnight movie for your fucked up friends—i

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Horror,

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Fascination (1979)

What if Eric Rohmer made a bisexual vampire movie? Well, it’d be an immoral tale such as Fascination. Of all the lesbian/bisexual vampire movies of the 70s this is the one that puts women in the most control over their sex and their prey. It’s not just a few women cooped up in a mansion, it’s a whole underground society. Fascination opens with a robbery that’s filmed liked grown ups playing the same shootout games that they did as kids. The wounded man stumbles in upon a woman’s home and though the man’s stunted and playing the same games he did as a child, these women have graduated to a w

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Horror,

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Tourist Trap (1979)

Alternately goofy as hell and downright creepy, Tourist Trap is one of the more bizarre slasher films to come out of the pre-80s onslaught, somehow managing to be unique despite borrowing heavily from the horror hits that preceded it. The film follows a fairly standard set of slasher victims; a group of youths who get stranded at remote gas station/museum filled with grotesque mannequins, which happens to be run by a creepy, murderous man who stalks them down one-by-one. That may all sound a bit par for the course, but Tourist Trap really earns its stripes when it gets going, exploring th

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Horror,

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Deathdream (1974)

Deathdream (aka Dead of Night) is one of the first narrative films to directly address the Vietnam War. In it, a soldier (Richard Backus) returns home from Vietnam after his parents (John Marley and Lynn Carlin) had already received a letter from the army stating that he was killed in combat. The logline for Bob Clark‘s (Black Christmas, Porky’s) second feature labels the man a zombie, but he returns addicted to blood and kills animals and locals so that he can inject blood into his veins and keep living. Needing blood like clockwork in order to keep living? Sounds a little bit like a vampi

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Horror,

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The Asphyx (1972)

The Asphyx is slow-burn Victorian horror, which usually falls well outside my range of interests, but what it demands in patience, it makes up for in a purely original story that somehow hasn’t been replicated since. The title refers to an ancient creature that comes to claim your soul at the moment of death, and the film centers around Sir Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens), a fancypants high society doctor who begins experimenting with the creature; first by capturing its image, and ultimately trying to capture the entity itself in a dangerous quest for immortality. The film’s plotting st

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Horror,

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