There are bad slashers, and then there are slashers so profoundly stupid they feel like a parody written by someone who has never actually seen one. Do You Wanna Know a Secret? (2001) is firmly in that second category—a 90-minute catastrophe wrapped in a rubber mask, starring Joey Lawrence from Blossom, Jeff Conaway cashing a … Read More “Do You Wanna Know a Secret? (2001) – A Secret That Should’ve Stayed Buried” »
Stuart Gordon gave us Re-Animator and From Beyond, so naturally, when he said, “Let’s adapt Lovecraft again, but this time in Spain with three euros and a dream,” we said, “Sure, why not.” The result is Dagon—a film that takes Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth and stuffs it through a blender of bad dubbing, cheap … Read More “Dagon (2001) – Or How to Drown Lovecraft in Olive Oil and Tentacles” »
By the time you’ve reached the seventh film in the Children of the Corn franchise, you’re not so much watching a horror movie as you are taking part in a psychological experiment. What does it take to break a viewer’s will? How many shots of evil cornfields and spooky kids can you endure before your … Read More “Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001) – A Revelation in How Bad Horror Sequels Can Get” »
There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies based on Dean Koontz short stories, adapted for TV, and starring Jay Mohr. Black River (2001) is the latter. This is the cinematic equivalent of being stuck in a dentist’s waiting room while The X-Files plays on a bootleg VHS tape recorded over your cousin’s … Read More “Black River (2001): When Dean Koontz Meets Made-for-TV Purgatory” »
There are bad movies, and then there are movies so desperate to be “cool” that they choke on their own sunglasses. Versus(2000), directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, is very much in the latter camp. It’s a Japanese zombie action horror film that wanted to be the lovechild of The Matrix and Evil Dead but ended up … Read More “Versus (2000): Zombies, Yakuza, and a Forest That Won’t Shut Up” »
Sequels are tricky business. Some expand the universe (Aliens), some reinvent the wheel (Evil Dead II), and some stumble in wearing a fencing mask, trip over their shoelaces, and faceplant into a pile of clichés. Urban Legends: Final Cut falls squarely into the last category. Released in 2000, this follow-up to the already-questionable Urban Legend(1998) … Read More “Urban Legends: Final Cut – When Even Death by Kidney Theft Feels Boring” »
If you were alive in the year 2000, you probably remember The Cell being marketed as some mind-blowing, visually stunning, “Jennifer Lopez in leather” psychological horror ride. What we got instead was a long music video about child abuse, drowning tanks, and Vincent D’Onofrio doing his best impression of a Hot Topic clearance rack. Directed … Read More “The Cell: Or How to Crawl Inside a Killer’s Head and Still Come Out Bored” »
A Monster Playing a Monster There are vampire movies, and then there’s Shadow of the Vampire—a film so committed to its own madness that you half expect it to bite you halfway through the runtime. Directed by E. Elias Merhige, it takes the old legend that Max Schreck, the star of Nosferatu, was a real … Read More “Shadow of the Vampire (2000) A Monster Playing a Monster” »
Welcome to Fallbridge College: Where Satan Majors in Overacting Ah, the year 2000. The Y2K bug had fizzled out, Limp Bizkit was still culturally relevant, and someone at ABC thought, “Hey, remember that hokey 1973 TV movie about witches at a girls’ school? Let’s remake it, but worse.” Thus was born Satan’s School for Girls, … Read More “Satan’s School for Girls (2000): A Remedial Course in Bad TV Horror” »
Prelude to a Headache Ah, Sanctimony. A title that promises solemnity, virtue, maybe even a moral lesson. Instead, what you get is Uwe Boll’s warm-up lap before he started churning out cinematic war crimes like House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. If this was Boll’s attempt to show us his grasp of … Read More “Sanctimony (2000): Uwe Boll’s Early Proof That Cinema Has No God” »