Poché Pictures

The Beginning of the End (Again) When you hear Tomie: Beginning, you might think this is where everything started: a fresh, eerie prequel to explain why our girl Tomie keeps popping up like a demonic game of whack-a-mole across an endless franchise. What you actually get is a reminder that some horror series are less … Read More “Tomie: Beginning (2005)” »

When Syfy Decided CGI Snakes Were Enough There are bad movies, there are Syfy original movies, and then there’s Snakeman (or The Snake King, if you want to give it a name that sounds slightly less like a rejected Pokémon). Released in 2005, this “film” slithered its way onto TV screens with the promise of … Read More “Snakeman (2005)” »

The Trap is the Movie Itself The premise of Saw II is simple: a group of ex-cons and degenerates wake up trapped in a booby-trapped house filled with poison gas, and they have two hours to solve puzzles before their lungs give up. Sounds tense, right? Except the real trap is that you, the audience, … Read More “Saw II (2005)” »

From Scary VHS to Sleepy DVD Let’s be clear: The Ring Two had everything going for it. It was the sequel to a massive horror hit, it had Naomi Watts returning, it even had the original Ringu director Hideo Nakata stepping in for Gore Verbinski. This should have been a slam dunk. Instead, it’s like … Read More “The Ring Two (2005)” »

Smelling Death in the Desert If you’re going to name your film Reeker, you’d better deliver something nasty. And boy, does Dave Payne’s supernatural slasher deliver—it smells like death, rot, and roadkill in July, and yet somehow manages to be one of the more inventive horror movies of the early 2000s. Released in 2005 (and … Read More “Reeker (2005)” »

The Russ Meyer Tribute Nobody Asked For There’s a fine line between homage and humiliation. Pervert! (2005), directed by Jonathan Yudis, claims to be a loving tribute to the trash-art sexploitation films of Russ Meyer. What it ends up being is like watching someone attempt to paint the Mona Lisa with ketchup packets and a … Read More “Pervert! (2005)” »

A Title That Lied to Me Let’s start with the obvious: Mexican Werewolf in Texas is not about a Mexican werewolf. I know, I was just as shocked as you. You go in expecting a shaggy beast in a sombrero tearing through cow pastures while mariachi music plays in the background, but no—what you get … Read More “Mexican Werewolf in Texas (2005)” »

Swarms, Science, and Small-Town Terror Natural horror films have always thrived on simple formulas: take a familiar critter, crank it up to monstrous proportions, and drop it onto unsuspecting humanity. From Hitchcock’s The Birds to the many shark films that followed Jaws, the genre has been a playground for our primal fear of the natural … Read More “Locusts: The 8th Plague (2005)” »

Let’s be honest: It Waits is the kind of horror film you find in the clearance rack at a truck stop next to bootleg copies of The Fast and the Furious 2. It’s cheap, it’s cliché, and the monster looks like a rejected Buffy the Vampire Slayerprosthetic. But here’s the catch—it has Cerina Vincent. And … Read More “It Waits (2005) – A Forest, A Demon, and a DVD Bin” »

A Franchise That Refuses to Stay Dead If the first House of the Dead film felt like a bootleg copy of Resident Evil filmed in someone’s backyard with ketchup blood packets, House of the Dead 2 is proof that studios will greenlight anything if the catering budget is under twenty bucks. Directed by Michael Hurst … Read More “House of the Dead 2 (2005) – When your video game tie-in makes you wish you were the zombie” »