Friday, April 19, 2024

Movie Reviews

Reviews of primarily American movies featuring actors and actresses of Black / African-American descent in the horror-movie, slasher, gore, supernatural and related spooky film genres.

Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow horror movie poster
As much as I love Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow, it's one of those films that revolves around an issue in a black community (in this case, voodoo and political turmoil in Haiti), but examines it through the eyes of a white protagonist. This is a sub-genre I...
Frogs horror movie poster
You'd be hard-pressed to find a less intimidating title for a horror movie than Frogs, but those who've witnessed Kermit's coke-fueled tirades first-hand know how scary these creatures can be. Frogs is set in an unnamed, Louisiana-esque swampy locale. Ray Milland, coupled with his role in The Thing with...
Deathly Realities horror movie poster
S. Torriano Berry, director of the early "urban horror" film The Embalmer and member of the Black Horror Movie Hall of Fame, had previously written and directed an African-American Twilight Zone of sorts in the mid-'80s, entitled The Black Beyond. While I don't think it was seen on TV...
Frankenfish horror movie poster
Despite the campy title and movie poster, Frankenfish is actually a pretty straightforward horror film -- as straightforward as a movie about giant killer fish can be. It's refreshing to see a horror film with a largely black cast that doesn't revolve around the ghetto and in fact doesn't...
Crazy as Hell movie poster
The dopey title Crazy As Hell doesn't give much indication of the quality of this production (though I suppose a lesser film would've been called Hella Crazy), but it does pretty succintly sum up the basic components of the story: insanity and the Devil. Michael Beach, adding to his...
Devon's Ghost The Legend of Bloody Boy
An otherwise inept horror film, Devon's Ghost is noteworthy as one of the rare non-"urban" slashers to star a black woman as the "final girl". The gal in question is Karan Ashley, who also co-wrote, produced and edited the film, which goes a long way to explaining how she...
Night of the Living Dead 1990 horror movie remake poster
Horror remakes are all the rage these days, so in some ways, the 1990 Night of the Living Dead "redux" was ahead of its time. Sure, the George Romero original is a classic, and a remake could never recapture its magic, but this version, directed by special effects legend...
Terror Train 2022
The original Terror Train is generally considered a cornerstone of the Golden Age of slashers—and, along with Halloween, The Fog and Prom Night, is one-fourth of the quartet of films that turned Jamie Lee Curtis into a scream queen—so it’s surprising that it took until 2022 for it to...
Black Holler
Remember all those slasher movies back in the '80s that featured a black "final girl" vanquishing the unstoppable psychopathic killer during the nail-biting, climactic finale? Me neither. Lucky for us, Black Holler is here to re-envision that era with a modern parody/homage that is single-handedly more inclusive than the...
The Sand AKA Blood Sand horror movie
"Admirable" probably isn’t the first (or 20th) word you’d think of to describe a movie about killer sand, but The Sand feels like a well-intentioned attempt at a post-racial horror film that bucks genre conventions of pre-determined roles based on looks, race and gender. It's otherwise SyFy-level fare with dated...