I was disappointed to learn that "the Hammer Collection" didn't star MC Hammer. In fact, there few, if any, significant black characters -- just a bunch of pasty British people -- in any of the legendary UK studio's films, but I thought that a zombie/voodoo pic might be the...
Curse III (not to be confused with Cursed Part 3) is sort of a precursor to Drag Me to Hell, minus all the humor and talent. Unrelated to the first two films in the Curse series, this one takes place in an unspecified East African country in 1950 --...
Genre films about supernatural Nazi evildoings have been around since King of the Zombies (released during the Nazi regime of the 1940s, before the US even entered WWII), but they've exploded in number in the 21st century, headed by the likes of Hellboy, Dead Snow, Outpost, Frankenstein's Army, Iron...
WARNING: This film may cause disorientation, seizures, and uncontrollable eye-rolling. While I give props to Wendell Hubbard, the director of Recoil, for experimenting with the camera, after 200 ridiculous close-ups, shaky cameras, over-the-shoulder and beneath-the-crotch angles, and so-in-the-dark-you-can't-make-out-anything shots, it's too much to deal with. On top of that,...
A decent yet otherwise undistinguishable low-budget Friday the 13th rip-off, Bloody Murder 2 does earn some distinction for a conversation between a stock black character named Elvis (Raymond Novarro Smith) and white gal Sophie (Amanda Magarian) regarding the conventions of horror movie deaths:
Elvis: "Everybody knows black guys get it...
Let's face it: 1990 was basically the after party for the '80s, as the cultural trends of the old decade carried over into the new one -- or don't you remember the shoulder pads that could impale a horse? As such, even though The Suckling came out in 1990,...
In the days leading up to the release of Us, writer-director Jordan Peele took to Twitter to declare -- presumably in response to critics who are all too eager to label his film a “social thriller” or some such nonsense -- that it is indeed a horror movie. Unlike...
Of all the all-black horror movies to receive a theatrical release since the Blaxploitation era (let's say, four), Tales from the Hood is probably the best. Smarter than Bones, with a grander scale than Def by Temptation, and well, it's not Vampire in Brooklyn, TFTH follows the standard Tales from the Crypt...
After the mediocre Red Planet and the outright abomination that was Mission to Mars, you'd think that filmmakers would shy away from setting movies on Mars for, like, ever. But Doom dares to transport us once again to the planet where good scripts go to die. The story here...
Son of Dracula is notable in its unusually large number of black characters -- five speaking parts -- although all of them are marginal, not even important enough to be neck-bite victims. It's indicative of the time: all of the black people are servants, but at least they're not...
