Tuesday, July 1, 2025

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.

Blackenstein horror movie poster
It would be easy to assume that Blacula is a cheesy throwaway with camp-only value, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Blackenstein, on the other hand, is a sad, sad excuse for a film. On some level, though, that's what makes it so good -- er, well,...
Horror of Party Beach horror movie poster
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...
Zombie Zombi 2 horror movie poster
I don't expect Italian horror movies to have too many black people, but when they revolve around zombies on a Caribbean island, as Zombi 2 does (Zombi being the name Dawn of the Dead was released under in Italy), I'd expect more than a few. I should learn to...
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...
Exorcist II: The Heretic horror movie poster
The magical land of Africa once again draws in more white people than Narnia and Middle Earth combined. Most of this film takes place in the United States four years after Regan's (Linda Blair) cock-filled dialogue in the first Exorcist, but there are also extended flashbacks to the adventures...
Stage Fright Deliria horror movie poster
It's rare that a black character in a horror movie gets the privilege of offing the killer -- in large part because he himself is usually dead long before the climax -- but that's exactly what happens in this English-language Italian slasher. The lone "black guy" in this case...
Abby horror movie poster
The title Abby might sound like a '70s sitcom (I can hear the theme song now: "Abby, she's crabby...kind of stabby."), but it's in fact a Blaxploitation horror movie that plays out unabashedly in the vein of The Exorcist. In fact, it came dangerously close to being called Blackorcist,...
Vampire in Brooklyn movie poster
When I was in college, I remember seeing an early screening of Vampire in Brooklyn featuring a Q&A session with director Wes Craven. To this day I regret not asking, "Why shouldn't I bludgeon you?" His answer, I imagine, would've been something along the lines of "Just because you...
Scream Blacula Scream horror movie poster
A decent follow-up to the original blaxploitation classic, Scream, Blacula, Scream finds Mamuwalde awakened by aspiring voodoo priest "Whatchoo Talkin' 'Bout" Willis (Richard Lawson) because, well, he' s an idiot. Mamuwalde proceeds to turn him into a vampire slave, and then Willis turns his girlfriend Denny (Lynne Moody) into...
Motor Home Massacre horror movie
At the risk of ruining this movie (Then again, it’s called Motor Home Massacre; can it be ruined any more than it already is?) by revealing the identity of the killer, this otherwise nondescript horror movie distinguishes itself by being *SPOILER ALERT* one of the rare (the first?) non-all-black slashers to...