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The Horror?!: In short: Back From The Dead (1957)
Kate Hazelton (Marsha Hunt), her brother-in-law Dick (Arthur Franz) and Kate's pregnant sister Mandy (Peggie Castle) have come to a small coastal town where Dick once lived for a nice, relaxing holiday. Alas, doom hangs over the holiday. Mandy has been hearing voices where there should be none to hear, and soon enough not only loses her child thanks to that particular state of mind, but also loses her identity. Very suddenly, Mandy takes on the personality of Dick's first wife Felicia.
The Horror?!: The Beast With A Million Eyes (1955)
Allan Kelley (Paul Birch), his wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) and their college-aged-yet-acting-like-twelve-for-most-of-the-time daughter Sandra (Dona Cole) are living in the desert, running a date ranch (interesting question for a non-American: why isn't it a date farm?) without much success. Helping them out is a mute, mentally ill, and more than slightly creepy man the family only calls "Him" (Leonard Tarver), for they can't be bothered to find out his actual name.
The Horror?!: Some Thoughts on The Spiral Staircase (1945)
I hardly need to tell anyone that Robert Siodmak's thriller comes close to early perfection of the form (and is stylistically closer to my heart than Hitchcock's comparable films, but let's not go there), nor that the biggest hurdles it has overcome for a modern viewer are its alcoholism-based comic relief, its jerky romantic lead (who fortunately isn't important to the narrative at all and disappears from it early on - it's a film most interested in its female characters), and what can be read as its ableist tendencies.
The Horror?!: In short: Horny House of Horror (2010)
aka Fashion Hell
Original title: Fasshon heru
Little do the friends of freshly eloped - and virginal! - Nakatsu (Yuya Ishikawa) expect that dragging their unwilling (eloped plus virgin plus thinking paying women for sex is morally problematic does make a guy awkward in this kind of situation, it seems - who knew!?) buddy into a "massage" parlour to celebrate his leaving their amateur baseball team will lead to lost primary sexual organs, fountains of blood, and death.
The Horror?!: Some Guy Who Kills People (2011)
Warning: here be rather large, yet unavoidable spoilers.
Cinema Suicide: Grand Guignol: The roots of horror cinema
Horror has been with the human race pretty much since our origin as a species. Fear lives deep in the reptilian brain and we’ve always used storytelling to help us deal with the shit that freaks us out.
The Horror?!: The New Daughter (2009)
After an unpleasant divorce, writer John James (Kevin Costner) moves with his teenage daughter Louisa (Ivana Baquero) and younger son Sam (Gattlin Griffith) to Mercy, South Dakota, or rather, a lonely house in the woods near Mercy, South Dakota.
Not surprisingly, the children aren't exactly happy about the move. Sam's a bit too young to actually understand what's going on, and seems mostly afraid and confused, while Louisa - in the throes of puberty and now half a country away from all her friends - blames herself, her father and her mother in turn.
The Horror?!: In short: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
If there's a more peculiar and specific way to make a guy feel old than Tomas Alfredson's rather brilliant John le Carré adaptation just found for me, I don't really want to know what it is. What got me was the (in fact pretty obvious, but I've never pretended to be able to see the obvious before it bites me in the ass) realization that you can adapt the good novels of John le Carré today only by turning them into period pieces, which feels slightly off to someone who does remember the Cold War as more than just a more or less exciting background for movies.
The Horror?!: On WTF: Sennentuntschi (2010)
I don't think I've ever talked about a Swiss movie here before, but who can resist a perfect piece of art house exploitation cinema like Michael Steiner's Sennentuntschi? It's the sort of film that could have found a place of honour in Tohill's and Tombs's Immoral Tales if it had been made a few decades earlier.
The Horror?!: In short: Zombie Apocalypse (2011)
Not to be confused with other Zombie Apocalypses. This is the Syfy/The Asylum one.
The Horror?!: In short: Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below (2011)
A little girl who has lost her father early in life enters Agharta, a semi-mythical world lying under the surface of the Earth. She falls in with her teacher cum agent of a secret society in his attempt to bring his dead wife back from the dead by opening the gate between the world of the living and the dead situated down there. The people living in Agharta are not amused. Various action sequences and obvious melodrama happen.
Badmovies.org: Badmovies.org Reviews "Alien 2: On Earth"
In this unauthorized Italian sequel to "Alien" a group of spelunking bowlers (Or are they bowling spelunkers?) discover that their favorite cave and favorite bowling alley are infested with alien monsters that hatch from rocks.
The Horror?!: Look Ma, I'm quoted in the Wall Street Journal!
Fellow M.O.S.S. agent Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood fame spends some of the 48 hours in her day on a weekly column about Bollywood movies for the India blog of the Wall Street Journal Online.
The Horror?!: Custodes Bestiae (2006)
After making some sort of big discovery via a handful of scratched photographs he has stumbled upon and a fresco he's restoring in a provincial village church, (art historian?) Professor Dal Colle (Giorgio Merlino) invites newspaper Journalist Londero (Massimiliano Pividore) to an interview in which he is planning to unveil whatever that discovery is.
The Horror?!: Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2010)
Because of the girl's obvious psychological troubles, her mother sends Sally (Bailee Madison) to live with her ex-husband Alex (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes, surprisingly decent here) in the Victorian mansion they are restoring to sell on.
The Horror?!: On WTF: Mr Wrong (1986)
There's a horrifying lack of write-ups of movies from New Zealand on this site or over at my WTF-Film column, so I'm glad to put things right a little by talking about the only good movie about a haunted car I know.
The Horror?!: Some Random Thoughts On Akira (1988)
Because who needs another full write-up of a classic everyone has already written about? Still, I have a handful of jumbled thoughts and ideas to share.
First of all, I'm impressed by how well the film still holds up as an aesthetic whole. A big part of the film's effect on me is the earnestness and relentlessness with which director Katsuhiro Otomo intensifies most of the more exhausting (one could say hysterical) tropes of anime and manga to the brink of the apocalyptic, creating a whole new set of tropes and concepts for later creators of anime to follow.
