After gaining some notoriety with his controversial The Crying Game, director Neil Jordan was picked to film the first of Anne Rice’s popular novels featuring the vampire Lestat. After some casting controversy regarding Tom Cruise, Rice completely reversed her opposition to him after viewing the finished film.
By no means a spectacular horror movie but it is a nice little ghost story. Director James Wan, rather than relying on cheap gore and torture, as in the Saw movies that he launched, opts here for old fashioned mystery and suspense.
There are very few decent childrens’ programs for Halloween outside of the classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Having already broken ground with Chicken Run, director Nick Park and Aardman Entertainment cast their signature duo, Wallace and Gromit, in a wonderfully playful horror spoof in their first feature-length motion picture.
Nearly identical to its progenitor, [REC], this American remake gets a slight edge over its predecessor by stripping away the supernatural elements and giving the zombie outbreak a more terrifying, earthly origin. This also gives Quarantine an element of whodunit that’s missing from the Spanish original.
Another excellent remake worthy of its predecessor. This time around the Red Scare overtones have been jettisoned in favor of a post-Nixon/Vietnam paranoia that sees the enemy as the establishment, conformity, and psychoanalytical self-centeredness. The film circles slowly around an ever-decreasing perimeter of safety as the protagonists first discover then try to escape from the otherworldly menace that claims them one by one.
Tremors didn’t get much love when it was initially released in the winter of 1990. Over time, it has garnered a respectable following, spawning three sequels and one television series, and putting it nearly on par with Planet of the Apes. Writers Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson, and director Ron Underwood nicely infuse the classic 1950s B movie monster motif with a touch of goofy, sometimes slapstick humor that manages to avoid degenerating into outright parody or farce.