Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Tag: cults

Voodoo Dolls
The Canadian production Voodoo Dolls feels like a relic -- even more so than the nearly three-decades-old film already is. Its images of a shirtless black man clad in tribal paint and beaded necklaces, drumming in a trance-like state and menacing the white female protagonist seem like they're straight...
They Remain
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...
Rosemary's Baby 2014
If you blinked, you probably missed the black guy in the original Rosemary's Baby: D'Urville Martin (later a Blaxploitation regular in films like Dolemite, Hell Up in Harlem, Hammer and Five on the Black Hand Side) as Diego, the hotel operator in the notorious apartment building The Bramford. The...
The Invitation movie poster
The Invitation is a delightfully demented thriller that plays on the awkward social dynamics of dinner parties, from meeting new people and trying to discern what makes them tick to reuniting with estranged friends and trying to get past what pulled you apart. Of course, this treatment takes things...
Initiation movie
Initiation is more action-thriller than horror, but if 2013's captive-women-forced-to-fight film Raze can be considered horror by so many people, I suppose this can, too. The setup is similar to Raze, except with male captives, a smaller cast and presumably a much smaller budget. In it, masked men kidnap five...
The Inheritance horror movie
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...
Nurse Sherri Black Voodoo horror movie poster
Although the cast of Nurse Sherri is pretty much racially integrated, and the character of Sherri is very much white, this film is often tagged as a Blaxploitation film -- particularly when re-titled Black Voodoo for VHS release with a complete racial 360 on the cover art: In the film, tig-ol-bittied Jill Jacobson gives...
Voodoo Tailz horror movie
I knew I was in for some deep-tissue pain when this movie opened with a voiceover that sounds more like a fifth-grade book report: Every Mardi Gras, college girls have ended up missing. Nobody knows who is kidnapping the girls, but legend has it that there is a bayou cult...
The Believers horror movie poster
Ah, the '80s. How could anyone forget the wacky trends of the era: Izod shirts, Rubiks Cubes, ALF and, of course, voodoo. How fondly I recall Saturday nights with the family gathered around the campfire, Grandpa gutting a virgin, Aunt Martha leading the zombies in a three-part round of...