Saturday, May 18, 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.

Snake Outta Compton
Snake Outta Compton is the type of movie about which it seems safe to assume the title came WAY before a single word of the actual script was written. It's a punny, grade-school-level concept that's indicative of the humor within, but thanks to its relentless, all-in goofiness, the film...
Soft Matter
The promotional materials for Soft Matter call it a cross between The Shape of Water and Get Out, a description that is troublesome not only because it's wildly inaccurate, but also because the only discernible similarity between it and Get Out is the fact that the main protagonist is...
horror movie VooDoo
I tend to eye any movie about voodoo that has nary a person of color in it suspiciously. Has voodoo become gentrified now? Are white people conjuring Baron Samedi in between their twerking sessions and "This Is America" parody videos? Coming across the title VooDoo, I had two immediate thoughts....
Angel Heart
Remember when the most controversial thing about the cast of The Cosby Show was Lisa Bonet's sex scene in Angel Heart? Ah, the good ol' days. The year was 1987, and the Huxtables were America's family, but their facade of upper-middle-class sitcom perfection took a hit when word came that...
The Suckling
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,...
The First Purge
Every movie in the Purge franchise has been more overtly sociopolitical than the one before it, and The First Purge takes the series to new, gloriously radical heights in a powerful, if unsubtle, expression of the fear, frustration and anger of people of color in the United States. It's...
Phantom of the Grindhouse
Even though we're well into the 21st century, it's still disturbingly rare to find a black person playing the primary villain in a horror movie -- despite the fact that black is overwhelmingly the skin color of choice for anonymous gang members and thugs in any genre. Why would...
A Haunted House
Marlon Wayans had a hand in writing Scary Movie, the entertaining surprise hit from 2000 that rekindled America's taste for spoof movies -- following the Airplane! series of the '80s and the Naked Gun flicks of the '90s -- but if his latest genre sendup A Haunted House is...
A Haunted House 2
To those of you who boosted A Haunted House's opening weekend last year to a better-than-expected $18 million, you have no one but yourselves to blame for the misery that is A Haunted House 2. Picking up where A Haunted House left off, Malcolm (Marlon Wayans) and his cousin Ray...
Meet the Blacks
In modern horror, it seems a movie isn't a true success until someone parodies it. Black filmmakers have taken a prominent role in the horror parody genre, from the Wayans brothers' Scary Movie franchise to Marlon Wayans' A Haunted House movies. Heck, even Tyler Perry's Madea Halloween flicks have some...