Saturday, November 2, 2024

Tag: made for tv

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 Midnight Hour movie poster
I remember the awe with which I watched this made-for-TV movie as a child. I didn't have cable, and The Midnight Hour came as close to HBO as anything I had access to outside of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on Friday Night Videos. This comparison is apt, as Midnight Hour's...
Fear Itself horror TV show
Fear Itself was a poor man's Masters of Horror, with all of the talent but little of the bite of that Showtime program. And yet, it was still refreshing to see a weekly dose of horror on network television, so I was bummed when NBC pulled it after only...
Stephen King's The Stand movie poster
Stephen King loves mystical darkies! In particular, he's partial to the Southern, rustic, uneducated variety (see also The Green Mile). I half expected that in The Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman would sprout wings or take the form of a bucket of water, but King decided to exercise "restraint" (whatever)....
Trilogy of Terror horror movie DVD
This relatively tame made-for-TV anthology has achieved cult status amongst even the most hardcore horror fans for three simple words: Zuni...fetish...doll. The little African bugger (I say African because although the Zuni are a Native American tribe, the doll was confirmed in the sequel to be African.) has become...
Trilogy of Terror 2 horror movie
The creators of this long-awaited sequel certainly knew where their bread was buttered, as they chose to feature the ol' Zuni fetish doll on the video artwork with no regard whatsoever to the human stars. As with the original Trilogy of Terror, the first two stories, fine as they...
Masters of Horror: The V Word
Black Horror Movie Hall of Fame member Ernest Dickerson was tabbed by Showtime's Masters of Horror TV show to direct this episode, a solid entry in Season Two. The title is a sly play on Showtime's The L Word, which Dickerson just happens to have directed in the past....
The House of Dies Drear movie poster
I'm not ashamed to admit that as a kid, I found this film pretty spooky. I mean, what kind of PBS movie has the word "die" in it? As it turns out, Dies Drear is someone's name -- a 19th-century, distinctly John Brown-esque white abolitionist who was killed helping...
Rod Serling in Night Gallery movie poster
The highlight of this feature-length anthology pilot for Rod Serling's TV series Night Gallery is the opening story, "The Cemetery," a delicious cat-and-mouse game between iconic actors Ossie Davis and Roddy McDowall. Davis plays Portifoy, long-time butler to a rich old white geezer. He thinks he's in line to...