HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES **** USA 2003 Dir: Rob Zombie. 88 mins Cut by the MPAA and dropped by Universal, Zombie’s feature debut was completed in 2000 but didn’t emerge until 2003 when, pre-empting the post-SAW wave of nihilistic American horror, it was joined by a bunch of genre…
Browsing: Franchise Corner
CANDYMAN ***** USA 1992 Dir: Bernard Rose. 92 mins “Your death would be a parable to frighten children with”. The opening story of the fifth volume of “Books of Blood”, Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” was a bleakly evocative story of urban folklore in a miserabilist vision of a Thatcher-era…
IT’S ALIVE **** USA 1974 Dir: Larry Cohen. 87 mins Writer-director Larry Cohen’s first horror movie is a semi-satirical modern monster movie with a title cannily aping the most famous line from classic Universal horror: hero John Ryan anecdotally acknowledges this by recalling his high school realisation that the…
CUBE **** Canada 1997 Dir: Vincenzo Natali. 90 mins. A dynamic TWILIGHT ZONE-esque concept effectively crafted for feature length, this has a small group of disparate characters removed from their everyday lives and placed in a huge, constantly revolving elaborate cube structure – rigged with a series of deadly…
SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT **** USA 1984 Dir: Charles E. Sellier Jr. 86 mins “So it’s not all phoney sentiment, is it? A lot of it is genuine greed…” Although various other movies had already featured a homicidal Santa (Amicus’ 1972 flick TALES FROM THE CRYPT uses the idea…