Beware! The game's afoot. Once again, the archives have been unburied, and the hideous horrors unleashed! For your entertainment and edification pleasure, of course.
Members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers dig six feet deep to find their past misdeeds...and reveal them to you, one favorite and notable post at a time!
Classic-Horror dares to delve deeply into Blood for Dracula:
With all the revolutions in the film industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of the older film monsters were starting to appear cliché, even trite. Dracula, long the enemy of Victorian standards, needed to be updated for a time when such standards had long passed. Leave it to pop artist/film producer Andy Warhol and director Paul Morrissey to do this by flipping the rules around and making Dracula the pathetic victim of permissive social mores.
Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat reviews Duncan Jones's indie sci-fi thriller Moon:
I finally saw Duncan Jones's science-fiction character-piece-cum-thriller Moon, and was glad I braved the sweat-soaked journey down to the Landmark Sunshine to do so. Moon is very, very much a creature of its own influences, and owns up to this repeatedly--and wisely, I think. If you're going to do a suspense story about a man stranded in a cabin-fever outer-space environment with a soft-spoken computer for company, what's the sense of playing cat and mouse with Kubrick?
Theofantastique posits the oppositional reconstruction of vampire symbolism in 30 Days of Night:
After watching the film I came away with the general impression that this is a good vampire film with the potential to breathe new life into cultural treatments of the vampire icon, and it is the cultural reconstruction of the vampire through this film that I will touch on with this post.
Vault of Horror opens up with their defense of The Mist:
Far be it from a curmudgeon like me to say this, but I think it's entirely possible that we as horror fans run the risk of occasionally becoming a bit too cynical for our own good. Case in point: Why is it that a movie like Frank Darabont's The Mist, a solid, enjoyable horror flick, has been so roundly pummeled by the online horror community? This morning I'm taking a stand and saying it's damn fine little fright film.
Day of the Woman lists the top 10 horror films you must see, but not very often:
Having to think of films that aren't necessarily "great" films by any measure but are must sees has inspired me to give you fine womanizers A LIST! So I racked out my little brain and my 19 years of horror film obsession to think of 10 films I think every horror fanatic should see but not necessarily very often.
Cinema Suicide walks with The Walking Dead comic book series:
Kirkman writes fearlessly, axing characters when he feels that the story needs the emotional impact of major character deaths. But what he also gets right, where other zombie writers fail miserably, he makes the story about the human drama rather than an action book about killing monsters.
Groovy Age of Horror shares his beef with bad-arsed jadedness in horror:
To be fair, this is only a handful of pretty marginal examples, but I really feel like something's getting lost in contemporary horror, even in supernatural horror, and that is a sense of the supernatural as inherently uncanny. This unfortunate trend strikes me as pretty recent.
Uranium Cafe ponders Ron Ormand's strange The Monster and the Stripper:
As hard as it may be for the uninitiated neophyte to conceive there is a class of “cult”* film makers whose technical skill and dubious vision are on a lower rung of the film making ladder than even Ed Wood, Jr.
Dinner With Max Jenke writes up sleazy classic Vice Squad:
What's amazing about Vice Squad is that the film - and Hauser's performance - manage to surpass whatever expectations one may have. If you see one movie about a killer pimp in your lifetime, it absolutely has to be Vice Squad - otherwise you haven't seen sh*t.
Until next week, then...and this week's photo courtesy of Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans.
Hey, there's a pick a post every Tuesday! So send in those links!
Posted by: Iloz Zoc | August 18, 2009 at 10:51 AM
Crap, I have really got to do better at responding to emails. I'm awful.
Posted by: Peter Hall | August 18, 2009 at 10:38 AM