There are haunted house movies that terrify you. There are haunted house movies that unsettle you. And then there’s The Haunting (1999), a haunted house movie that mostly makes you admire the drapery while wishing Owen Wilson’s head would just get lopped off already. Spoiler: it eventually does, but by then you’re too numb to … Read More “The Haunting (1999) – When Horror Got Lost in the Wallpaper” »
David Cronenberg is known for body horror classics—The Fly, Videodrome, Scanners. By the time eXistenZ rolled around in 1999, it seemed like he’d found the perfect late-’90s subject: the paranoia around video games, virtual reality, and the line between real and fake. Instead, what we got is a film that looks like it was written … Read More “eXistenZ (1999) – Bio-Ports, Bone Guns, and a Big Pile of Nonsense” »
There are slasher films, and then there’s Cherry Falls. A horror-comedy hybrid so audacious in its premise you almost wonder how it got made, let alone aired on American television in 2000. Geoffrey Wright’s film flips the slasher script in a way that feels both slyly subversive and gloriously trashy: in this small Virginia town, … Read More “Cherry Falls (1999) – Pop Your Cherry or Pop Your Clogs” »
Takashi Miike’s Audition is hailed as one of the most disturbing films ever made, a horror masterpiece that lulls you with romance before sawing off your foot. But let’s be real: most of the runtime feels like a made-for-TV drama about a widower learning to love again, until suddenly it remembers it’s supposed to be … Read More “Audition (1999) – Dating Is Hard, Especially When She Brings a Sack” »
Watchers Reborn is the fourth entry in the Watchers franchise, a series so unwanted that even Dean Koontz himself probably hides the DVDs under his couch when company comes over. Directed by John Carl Buechler—better known for making Jason Voorhees wear a chain necklace in Friday the 13th Part VII—this film stars Mark Hamill as … Read More “Watchers Reborn (1998) – Luke Skywalker and the Dog with Homework” »
Junji Ito’s manga Tomie is a grotesque fever dream about obsession, murder, and the horror of beauty that refuses to die. Ataru Oikawa’s 1998 film adaptation, on the other hand, is about… taking bad selfies, feeding cockroaches to people, and making audiences wish they’d just read the manga instead. Ito gave us an iconic monster: … Read More “Tomie (1998) – Immortal Beauty, Mortal Boredom” »
In 1998, Ring became a global sensation—an eerie, minimalist horror story that crawled into pop culture and made us all fear static TVs. At the exact same time, the studio released Spiral, its “official sequel.” The idea was synergy: double the films, double the box office. Instead, audiences got one classic… and one straight-to-VHS embarrassment … Read More “Spiral (1998) – The Forgotten Sequel That Should’ve Stayed in the Well” »
Hideo Nakata’s Ring is hailed as a masterpiece of slow-burn horror, a cultural phenomenon that gave the world Sadako, a cursed videotape, and Hollywood’s excuse to drown Naomi Watts in blue filters. But let’s be honest: watching Ring today feels less like being haunted by a vengeful spirit and more like being slowly nagged to … Read More “Ring (1998) – Seven Days of VHS Static and Ennui” »
Directed by Joe Chappelle and adapted by Dean Koontz from his own novel, Phantoms should be a disaster. And it kind of is. But it’s the right kind of disaster—the kind where Rose McGowan struts through Lovecraftian terror in a tight top, Joanna Going gives gravitas to a script that probably made Peter O’Toole weep … Read More “Phantoms (1998) – Chaos in the Flesh, Cleavage in the Frame” »
There are bad movies, there are so-bad-they’re-funny movies, and then there’s The Minion (1998)—a film so profoundly confused about its own identity that it spends 95 minutes lurching between Indiana Jones, The Exorcist, and Die Hard 3, and manages to screw them all up simultaneously. Directed by Jean-Marc Piché, starring Dolph “I-must-break-you” Lundgren, and co-starring … Read More “The Minion (1998) – Dolph Lundgren vs. Satan, Sponsored by Straight-to-Video Hell” »
