Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

"Look, we've only just met. I'm not really ready for the sort of commitment that holding-hands entails!"   Want to know something that I find just a touch odd? I can't really remember which horror-film I saw first as a child. I find it strange because I can recall snippets of going to the movies with my mom and dad, and seeing 1973's THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD, and THE TOWERING INFERNO in 1974, something which inspired four-year-old me to draw a hi-rise fire the very next day, and to briefly dream of becoming a firefighter when I grew up.  But my initial dabbling in what ended up becoming my favorite film genre? I 'm really not sure which film that was. It was definitely on television, because my first trip to see a fright-flick in the theater wouldn't happen until 1979 (more on that later), and by that point I was already a minor horror veteran.  What I do recall very well is that the very first horror-character to make a lasting impression on me as ...

Netflix and chill? Try True-Crime and Snuff. "We see you. And you are obscene." Damn. My roommate had already seen this one, and didn't consider it a horror film. But she's quite wrong about that, because RED ROOMS absolutely IS a horror film. It's not a slasher. It's not supernatural. It's not even a Giallo.  It's not horror by any standard of measurement that most people would use, but it's a horror film all the same. Deeply psychological, and deeply riveting, it's very rare that a horror film reaches out, grabs me, draws me in and holds me there the way RED ROOMS did. Sure, I wasn't frightened in the way that I was when I watched Steven Soderbergh's 2018 thriller UNSANE a few marathons back. No, that one managed to shake me because of the 1-2 punch of it's very immersive presentation, and the fact that I didn't realize that I had a fear of involuntary commitment until I watched it. I didn't realize that until I noticed...

  Just a very quick-and-dirty post that I will no doubt tweak, but I wanted to give everyone who pays no heed to this infrequently updated blog a heads-up that it's that time again, for the 9th consecutive year! Here's this year's lineup, updated as of August the 26th: Angst (1983) Bad Moon (1996) Cooties (2014) Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (2021) Dead Mail (2024) Depraved (2019) Doctor X (1932) Evil Dead (2013) Fortress (1985) Hellbender (2021) Island of Lost Souls (1932) Jacob's Ladder (1990) Lair of the White Worm (1988) The Legend of Hell House (1973) The Long Walk (2025)  Malignant (2021) The Monkey (2025) The Mothman Prophecies (2002) Night of the Devils (1972) Night of the Reaper (2025) Nightbeast (1982) Nightmare (1981) Oddity (2024) Onibaba (1964) Red Rooms (2023) Red Snow (2021) The Savage Hunt of King Stakh (1979) Seeds (2024) Sinners (2025) Slumber Party Massacre (2021) Splinter (2008) Stage Fright (1987) Stopmotion (2023) Strange Harvest (2...

Go rafting, he said. It'll be fun, he said. Well, now he's DEAD, and I'm not having fun at all. "If you people want to survive, you better start looking and thinking like the forest." Filmed in 1981 (save for the tacked-on prologue that was shot almost 2 years later), this flick sat on the shelf until finally earning a theatrical release in 1983, which was after Daryl Hannah and Adrian Zmed had gone on to make names for themselves elsewhere. Elsewhere being 'Blade Runner' and 'T.J. Hooker' respectively.  Yes, I said Daryl Hannah . And yes, I alluded to William Shatner.  Directed by Andrew Davis, who would later go on to direct the likes of 'Under Siege' , 'The Fugitive' and 'Holes' , 'THE FINAL TERROR' didn't make much of a splash at the Box Office and the critics were less than kind, but the advent of the home video era made it a stalwart shelf-warmer of Mom-and-Pop video stores across the nation, and anothe...

What ye sow, so shall ye reap, or some shit like that.  "Name's Buck. I'm rarin' to fuck." So, when the first line spoken in a horror film is the above quote (spoken by a baby-faced Robert Englund) you'd be forgiven for double-checking to make sure that you hadn't rented a porn flick instead. After that, you really shouldn't be too surprised by the batshit lunacy that follows when you remind yourself that this is the second film made by director Tobe Hooper, creator of the legendary 'TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE' , and it became one of the first films to be labeled a "video nasty" in the UK. Scuzzy lunacy of the batshit variety is exactly what you get here. While 'Chainsaw' is definitely the more harrowing and grimier of the two, this one is definitely bloodier and sleazier than its predecessor, and just as bizarre.   Part of that is down to the fact that this film is stage bound, which makes it feel rather artificial in a way that...

Surely my online interactions won't bite me in my ass in a literal sense. Right? "Drifted apart? Is that how you remember it?" Yeah, yeah, it's been forever. Read up anyway! 😆 The overall idea driving this film is somewhat simple and boils down to "Slasher-flick but over Skype" which is one of those notions that could certainly go either way. As with pretty much everything else, it all comes down to the execution, doesn't it?  'UNFRIENDED' is a film that garnered some bad reviews and mentioning it in places like r/horror can still drum up a contingent of naysayers. I agree with some of the criticism, but a lot of it seems like reflexive disdain for "these kids today and their bliggetty-blogs and their facey-spaces and their tweety-pages" (my apologies to Denis Leary) rather than any genuine observation and analysis of the film on its own merits. So, let's get the bad out of the way, and then we'll talk about the good.  When it...

  A 1979 TV movie about Vampires? Oh come on, that can't possibly be very scary...right? "You'll sleep with the dead, teacher."   Sometimes you get a little tired of soulful and seductive cinematic vampires and long to see a return to a more unsettling depiction where they are portrayed as ruthless, remorseless predators who seek out the blood of the living, both to feed their insatiable hunger, and to increase their own numbers. If that's the sort of vampire tale that gets your own blood pumping, then this is a film for you. A somewhat sad truth of horror-cinema is that flicks based off the works of Stephen King are something of a mixed-bag. You have the likes of ' Carrie ', ' Cujo ', ' Christine ', ' IT ', ' The Mist ', and ' Misery ', all of which are good adaptations, and also very good films in their own right. Then you have excellent non-horror adaptations in the form of ' The Green Mile ', ...

This, the third film-adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel, "The Body Snatchers", does quite a lot of things right, but ultimately falls a bit short.  "They get you when you sleep." - Andy  This is going to get spoilery, so if you haven't watched this flick and don't like spoilers, then you may want to skip this review.  So, as I mentioned before, this is remake month, and as was the case with DRACULA (though not to the same extent), there are more than two film adaptations of Jack Finney's 1954 science fiction novel "The Body Snatchers" to choose from. So, before I hit this version, I watched both of the previous versions, titled INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS , from 1956 and 1978, respectively.   Those adaptations are widely considered to be absolute classics by movie-buffs and critics alike, so, when compared to its predecessors, BODY SNATCHERS has some very big shoes to fill. We have another new setting, this time out of an Army-base...

DRACULA (1931) ***1/2 Tod Browning's Dracula is adapted from the then-popular stage-play, and the influence is quite obvious upon viewing, as the film eventually becomes quite stagey and static. A lot of the camera-work is pedestrian, and the scene transitions are often short and somewhat jarring. Too much exposition also slows down the film, and when compared to its contemporary, James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN, it simply doesn't fare as well. As some critics have remarked, its essentially a stylistic holdover from the silent-film era. And, as a last critique, this film doesn't end so much as simply STOP, and there's a big difference between these two concepts. However, for all its flaws, this movie definitely deserves its classic status. Even without a pair of fangs, Bela Lugosi set a standard as Count Dracula against which all others would be measured to this very day. His Dracula is stiff and formal, yet prone to sudden bursts of quick-fury. He's quite obviously...