Mighty Joe Young is basically "King Kong lite", from its tone (decidedly lighter) to the size of its gorilla (decidedly smaller) to the role of its black cast (decidedly less important). Like King Kong, the role of the black people in Mighty Joe Young is peripheral -- natives sharing...
They Remain opens with an H.P. Lovecraft quote ("Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed."), an indication of the content and the tone to follow. Typical of Lovecraftian fare, it's a bleak, thoughtful slow-burner about dark, unknown forces lurking beneath the surface of our world that...
Doctor Terror's House of Horrors, or as I like to call it, Dr. T's House of Hoes, is a fairly standard British horror anthology featuring Brit ho mainstays Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (and a very young -- yet still very creepy -- Donald Sutherland). Cushing, sporting some of...
Back in the 1950s and '60s, toxic waste could do anything: mutate animals to hundreds of times their size, give people super-human powers and, in the case of camp classic The Horror of Party Beach, turn submerged skeletons into killer Muppets. Apparently, it can even make crude racial stereotypes...
To say that Rudy Ray Moore is an acquired taste is like saying that Paris Hilton has no talent. Duh. His blue stand-up act aside, his films are low on budget and even lower on subtlety. Petey Wheatstraw, based on one of his acts, is the closest any of...
As I've pointed out previously, haunted house movies (especially major releases) rarely feature black families because, well, black families are rarely shown as embodying the suburban ideal that is inevitably shattered by a haunting. Home bucks that trend...to an extent. The family in question is half black -- that...
This Seven/Silence of the Lambs wannabe proves that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in Hollywood. Initially tabbed for a theatrical run (with the slightly less silly title D-Tox), Eye See You was shelved for three years before it went...
Watching The Inheritance, it’s hard not to think of it as an Afro-centric spin on the classic British thriller The Wicker Man, with their similarly constructed story lines about people lured to a remote locale by hosts who have dark, ulterior motives. Luckily, writer-director Robert O’Hara resisted the urge...
I knew I was in trouble when I saw that the DVD cover for this film said "Vampire Assassins," while the title screen read the singular "Vampire Assassin". Damn, continuity issues before the movie even begins! The second warning sign came when 10 or 15 minutes passed without me seeing...
Predating Full Moon releases like Killjoy by several years, Embalmer was one of the earliest of the "urban horror" films of the '90s. The movie brings to life a supposed urban legend of "Undertaker Zach", a killer so vicious that he inspired a Lizzie Borden-like hop scotch rhyme:
Tell you...
