Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

So, I've owned THE INCUBUS for over 2-decades on VHS, but I'd only ever watched it once before. My recollections of the majority of the film were somewhat dim, and I recall it being slow and a bit boring. What I did recall quite clearly, however, is the essence of that last minute or so of the film, which I won't spoil here. That climax (no pun intended) really stays with you. Its a shame the rest of the film can't quite measure up to that powerful and disturbing ending. Don't get me wrong: THE INCUBUS is a good horror-flick, and easily in the top-tier of horror flicks to come out of Canada in the 70's and 80's. It has a creepy atmosphere that creates a constant sensation of unease, as if you know something malevolent is out there, lurking just outside your field of vision. The scoring is excellent, and lends to those feelings of unease, and it also boasts an excellent soundtrack. The performances are good, with John Cassavetes delivering a strong, if odd, p...

Ahhhhh yes, THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN. It was one of those films I wanted to watch as a child, but wasn't able to do so during the time of its release. I vaguely remember coverage in FAMOUS MONSTERS at the time, not to mention some old video of Rick Baker showing a child around his workshop in the late 70's, which was very cool, footage which also featured the Melting-Man masks. All-in-all, it left a big impression on a young horror-fan like me, despite being unable to see the film itself. It was also a very formative time for me as well, for good and for ill. My parents got divorced, which was both good and bad. And on the brighter side, STAR WARS came out that same year, SUPERMAN would hit theaters the following year, and being a regular PBS viewer, I would soon discover DOCTOR WHO when one of the local PBS stations started airing the first bundle of Tom Baker serials in 1978. Heady stuff! It wasn't until I managed to spy a copy of this for rent at a small mom-and-pop v...

Its a rare thing for a film to affect me on a very deep level, to touch something almost primal and leave me effected by its resonance in its wake. I can think of only a handful of films that fit that description. SCANNERS cemented my adoration of horror as a genre. I'd always greatly enjoyed horror growing up, but this film led me truly fall in love with horror. It led me to embrace the fear and the artistry of the medium, and I can honestly say that it had a huge impact on my life. THREADS took the sum-total of my long-simmering cold-war terror in the face of possible nuclear annihilation, distilled it down into a concentrated dose, and then forced it down my throat. Bleak, unrelenting, cruel, hopeless, and immersive, this film became my inoculation against that fear, a fear which has never died. And every few years, I put on THREADS, and take another dose, shake myself out of the world it creates and then destroys, and go on with my life. THE CROW affected me largely because ...

Man, where to start. One of the most highly-rated and most talked about horror-films of 2018, HEREDITARY features what ends up being the complete and utter disintegration of a family that is already hanging on more-or-less by its emotional fingernails. And, in the process, first-time director Ari Aster knocks it out of the fucking park with his first at-bat. The film features the Graham Family, who is dealing with the passing of grandmother Ellen, and the resulting emotional fallout. Ellen was a mercurial, difficult woman, who has been living with her daughter's family for the past several years as her condition had deteriorated. Daughter Annie (played by the absolutely magnificent Toni Collette), her children Charlie, and Peter, and her husband, Steve, all deal with this in various ways. Steve takes care of the financial aspects, while Annie comes to terms with her deeply complicated feelings about her mother. 13-year old Charlie seems somewhat disconnected from the events and ex...

  Some of my favorite horror-films have strong elements of black-comedy running through them. The 1992 film DEAD ALIVE (AKA BRAINDEAD ) is one of Peter Jackson's first films, and its definitely hilarious, and totally gross. Another fine example is the absolutely phenomenal EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN (1987), which is one of my favorite horror-films of all time. While it is numerically a sequel to 1982's EVIL DEAD , its actually a remake/retelling of the same story, with a few tweaks. Other fine examples include SHAWN OF THE DEAD , ZOMBIELAND , and BEETLEJUICE . DEAD SNOW 2 could definitely be described as a mash-up of several of these films, and what a mash-up it is. The main character is the soul-survivor of the first outing, DEAD SNOW , a man named Martin. Martin and his friends had opted to spend their Easter vacation in a cabin near Øksfjord in Norway. They end up finding a stash of Nazi gold, which reanimates an SS commander named Hertzog, and his company of now-zombie so...

Snuff Film (noun) "A pornographic movie of an actual murder. May or may not be distributed for financial gain." So, I'm sure most of you have heard about "snuff films", and that most of you know that the existence of said films, as defined, is pretty much complete, moral-panic bullshit.  In TESIS, we have a young film student named Ángela who want to write her thesis on films containing violent imagery, and why such images hold fascination for people. She openly considers such footage to be "disgusting", and yet, at the start of the film, she tries to get an eyeful of a man who has been gruesomely killed on a subway track, but she is escorted away before she can see past the paramedics. Clearly, Ángela herself is morbidly interested in the concept and imagery violent death. She hears through the grapevine that another student, Chema, has a large collection of porn and violent horror films. Though he is uninterested and off-putting at first, he eventua...

*sighs* I really had to mull over this one, because I was left with a really bad taste in my mouth when it ended, and its taken me a while to form a verdict. And that verdict isn't a favorable one. Set in the area around Cape May in New Jersey, SUMMER OF '84 is, predictably enough, awash in 80's tropes. You know, like so much these days, from THE GOLDBERGS to STRANGER THINGS , be prepared to take a dip in the shallow end of the trope-pool. They are most definitely present, and yet it doesn't really evoke the feeling of living in the mid-80's. STRANGER THINGS, for all of its fudging of its 80's setting, does a much better job of summoning up that nostalgia and that atmosphere than SUMMER manages to evoke. Worse, the film really fails to subvert any of the tropes, and just gives you things like boys on bikes in the summertime, each of them occupying archetype slots that hearken to films like THE BREAKFAST CLUB , as they hang out in their Frog-Brothers tree-house...