Saturday, May 4, 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.

Pilgrim
Unlike Halloween and Christmas, Thanksgiving has struggled to find a foothold within the horror genre -- unless, perhaps, you’re a Native American who tells campfire stories about the White Man’s arrival, spreading pestilence, genocide and gluten intolerance. Cinematically speaking, though, Thanksgiving has been a famine for horror; even lesser...
The Tokoloshe
2013’s Ghetto Goblin was a cheapie from South Africa whose name change from Blood Tokoloshe reflected a cheesiness inherent in the production, but The Tokoloshe is a much more polished, professional affair that thankfully avoided a name change for American consumption, so we don’t have to deal with watching...
Escape Room
Despite the lack of diversity in Oscar nominations for 2019 movies, the year may be remembered in hindsight as a watershed moment for black women in a genre long snubbed by the Academy Awards: horror. 2019 witnessed black actresses play lead or featured roles in more than a dozen...
trick
First, there was Michael. Then, there was Jason, followed by Freddy, Chucky and Ghostface. Now, there’s Trick, a slasher villain who stands out from this storied group for one distinct reason: he sucks. Although it seems like the creators of the film Trick are trying to push him as...
Fatima's Revenge
Because pain often fuels creativity, one of the unintentionally positive consequences of the Trump administration's weaponization of intolerance, impropriety and disinformation is that it has provided plenty of fodder for provocative, sociopolitically inclined genre cinema, like the Purge franchise. In particular, the current culture of xenophobia has proven to...
Into the Dark: Crawlers
Aside from being a reliable source of quality holiday horror entertainment over the past year and a half, Hulu’s feature film anthology series Into the Dark has low-key become an inclusive showcase for women of color, who have starred in at least one-third of the episodes so far, including...
Leaf Blower Massacre 2
Leaf Blower Massacre 2 is exactly what it sounds like: a sequel to a movie about someone killing people with a leaf blower. Not coincidentally, Leaf Blower Massacre 2, like Leaf Blower Massacre, also revolves around someone killing people with a leaf blower. (To those of you who picked...
Karma movie poster
A third generation of Van Peebles van peebles his way through this SyFy movie about the misdeeds of the past coming back to haunt you. Maybe this is the family’s penance for Jaws: The Revenge? Too soon? In truth, Karma isn’t Jaws IV-awful; it’s at worst SyFy mediocre. And...
The Good Wifey (Guardian of Eden) movie
Originally titled Guardian of Eden, The Good Wifey changed its name presumably to capitalize on the success of the TV show The Good Wife, even though the first title actually makes more sense for the story. It features a character named Eden, after all -- a little girl who’s...
Pooka Lives movie poster
Pooka! was the third entry in Hulu’s Into the Dark series of holiday-themed horror movies, and nearly 20 editions in, it remains the best IMO. It also features the most identifiable titular character in the franchise, so it’s not surprising that it would be the first to receive the...