The Devil in the Details

Seeing as I got started so late this year with watching Christmas films and sharing them with you guys, I figure I’ve got about three more good ones left in me before the season has passed, maybe four at max. As a result, I’m trying to stick with real heavy hitters, avoiding guff like A Christmas Horror Story or even a few great films that are tangentially related to the holiday (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.) So without further ado, let’s talk about the Christmas horror film that everyone out there should have seen by now, Michael Dougherty’s follow-up to his 2007 wonderful Halloween-themed anthology film Trick 'r Treat, 2015's  Krampus. You see, Krampus isn’t just a great horror film that happens to take place over the holiday like  Black Christmas  or Better Watch Out . No, this is undeniably a Christmas film, and not even just for the obvious reasons that it features lots of Christmas music and the constant presence of familiar holiday iconography; no, t...

After years of waiting, I'm happy to announce that Vampire's Kiss has finally made the jump from obscure, out-of-print DVD to Blu-ray. It's a film I can't wait to discuss, as I've always found it kind of fascinating, but it's more than a little overwhelming attempting to figure out where to start with this strange little gem.  Despite what the marketing materials, box art, and muted public response to the film both then and now might imply, this isn't some forgettable whacky rom-com about a man who falls in love with a vampire. No, this is a film about a very twisted man who is lonely and desperately looking for love in all the wrong places. A successful yuppie living in New York, Peter Lowe is having something of an existential and/or identity crisis. He sleepwalks through life, day in and day out, with little time for anything besides idly passing time at the office, engaging in either corporate brown-nosing or torturing his poor secretary Alva. He is a...

European folk horror sure does give one pause to go stomping all over the British countryside. If you don't bump into pagan king Penda or a cult looking for some sort of convoluted sacrifice, you just might cross a hedgerow only to find yourself in a fantasy world populated with creatures of folklore. Someone probably should have mentioned this to David and his buddy Jack, the would-be heroes of today's film, John Landis's landmark work of horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London.   After an odd encounter with the locals in a strange pub, the pair are brutally attacked by some kind of animal, killing Jack and putting David in a hospital bed. Thing is, when David wakes up, he's told he was attacked by an escaped lunatic, while he remains adamant that whatever killed his friend was most assuredly not human. And another thing: he keeps having these strange dreams, and waking up in even stranger places, like the wolf exhibit at the local zoo. Something within him ...

Robin Hardy shopped around the seed of an idea for a sequel to his seminal seventies horror film The Wicker Man for many years before finally settling on an idea called Cowboys for Christ, which he first wrote and published as a novel in order to drum up interest in and funding for a film adaptation, which would be called The Wicker Tree. Considered more of a spiritual sequel than a true chronological one (though it's matter of debate in either case,) The Wicker Tree attempts to play around with familiar ideas and storytelling devices while also adding enough new material to justify itself as a standalone film, and whether it succeeds or not is quite hard to say. Critical reviews at the time were mostly critical and downright dismissive, concurring with audience and fan reaction. In my opinion, this is far from the worst thing that Hardy could have done in attempting to follow up a near-perfect horror film, but the relationship of this movie to its sister film makes it quite har...

Often called "the Citizen Kane of horror films," The Wicker Man is yet another horror classic facing an uphill struggle thanks to decades and decades of hype. It's easy to forget, then, that it's kind of a rough-hewn production; its variety of divisive edits are certainly proof of that. Cut up by censors and then cut up again to jive with foreign markets, the original release is often seen as inferior to later cuts, such as the 'final cut,' which is the one I'll be looking at today. Only thing is, Robin Hardy isn't immune to that unfortunate impulse to keep fiddling with his masterpiece until it begins to barely resemble the original, and so those popular later cuts are also full of the kind of stuff that probably should have stayed on the cutting room floor. In addition, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this film would struggle to shock and awe a modern audience raised on countless films and TV shows inspired by it, only you'd be dead wron...

I hate the attitude that most modern creatives and their audiences have, where everything has supposedly been done before and thus hackery is totally natural and not shameful at all and normal for growing boys and girls everywhere yada yada yada. A pox on you, I say! That kind of attitude has never gotten us anywhere. Sure, it's nice to tell yourself that there are no new original concepts left when turning in some pedestrian genre flick, but I think films like Anna and the Apocalypse prove that new takes on an old story can be pulled off easily by those with any talent or even ambition to create something that has heart and soul behind it... is what I would be saying if it weren't for how predictable and formulaic it becomes by the end. Indeed, it's more than a little forgettable, but what I can remember sticks out as particularly strong and worth the hour and a half of my life that I spent watching it. Three stars, a handsome and witty film.  Damn, only one paragraph so ...

Apparently, even bad books can make for great films in the hands of a master. Take for instance Bram Stoker's  The Lair of the White Worm:  originally a barmy horror novel that Stoker allegedly wrote while going insane from syphilis, it has been adapted here by none other than the cinematic madman Ken Russel, a man who was never one to back down from a challenge, and so his film is a conscious attempt to take a stinker of a horror yarn and turn it into a fun, charming piece of B-horror entertainment, and, for the most part, it succeeds admirably. Russel takes the structure and basic premise of the novel along with a few of its characters, combines them with elements from Dracula while playing up the unintentionally silly and overwhelmingly British aspects of Stoker's plotting, especially the habit of his characters to drop everything right then and there and have an impromptu cup of tea while they discuss their next move. Stuff that was unintentionally bad before and sort of a...

So here it is: the infamous ...Scary of Sixty-First. Sold as something of a horror-thriller in the vein of Roman Polanski's apartment films with a modern, anti-establishment edge, it has divided critics and audiences alike on release, and I'll say up front: it's easy to see why. The Scary of Sixty-First opens with two women apartment hunting in New York. Our 'lead,' Addie, in classic psychological horror fashion, is living out an utterly nightmarish existence. Her boyfriend won't pay attention to her, especially sexually, because he's either decorating for Christmas or playing cheap Facebook games (come on, these are not the kind of video games that distract people from sex) and her roommate for unknown reasons seems to be preparing to leave Addie behind and continue her adventures elsewhere, despite their brand-new digs. Things then threaten to spiral out of control when another unstable and mysterious woman enters into the picture, claiming to be an inter...