The first segment of this made-for-cable horror anthology from John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, "The Gas Station," stands out not only as the best of the three tales, but also the only one relevant to this website (fancy that). This little chiller is notable as one of the very...
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner meets Rosemary’s Baby in Kindred, a polished, well-acted British thriller whose intriguing potential ultimately devolves into a ball of toothless frustration. The story revolves around Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), a black woman whose white live-in boyfriend Ben’s (Edward Holcroft) family is a bit...clingy. When he...
The promotional materials for Soft Matter call it a cross between The Shape of Water and Get Out, a description that is troublesome not only because it's wildly inaccurate, but also because the only discernible similarity between it and Get Out is the fact that the main protagonist is...
Chosen Survivors provides one of the earliest examples I've found of a "heroic death" by a black character in a horror movie. The phenomenon of black heroic death has served a purpose similar to that of the black "authority figure": it's a way for mainstream films to present more...
Black Santa's Revenge is a Blaxploitation-inspired short film that's as much an action thriller as it is horror, but given the dearth of Christmas horror movies starring black actors (I'll pause while you try to think of one), it's close enough for me. Horror icon Ken Foree stars as...
Blacula has become synonymous with black horror -- and rightly so -- but beyond being a seminal film that kickstarted the modern concept of black horror, it was also one of the earliest and most successful movies in the influential "Blaxploitation" era of cinema, propelling a movement that satiated...
This twisted little flick is often neglected in retrospectives of the slasher sub-genre, but it's a great early example of the style that doesn't get bogged down trying to decipher why Matthew (Fred Holbert) kills -- as Chris Rock once said, "Whatever happened to 'crazy'?" -- instead, letting his...
The Sharknado series began as a charmingly low-brow, tongue-in-cheek sendup of the disaster and killer animal movies you can catch on SyFy every weekend. It was initially innocuous, relatively low-key camp, but over time, the series has bought into its own viral appeal and now tries way too hard...
How can you tell if a horror film is "urban"? Misspelling! If they use "z" instead of "s" or "y" instead of "i" or "da" instead of "the," your oddz R da bomb yo! The description of this shot-on-film Z-grade flick says that Jakeem (Richard Carroll, Jr.) is framed...
The highlight of this feature-length anthology pilot for Rod Serling's TV series Night Gallery is the opening story, "The Cemetery," a delicious cat-and-mouse game between iconic actors Ossie Davis and Roddy McDowall. Davis plays Portifoy, long-time butler to a rich old white geezer. He thinks he's in line to...
