When “Alien on Water” Becomes “Dinosaurs in Latex” The pitch was supposedly Alien at sea. What we got was more like “Jurassic Park but someone left the suit in the dryer”. The monster, stitched together from leftover Carnosaur 2 scraps, waddles around like it’s late for a kid’s birthday party gig. It can barely open … Read More “The Haunted Sea (1997) — Krista Allen…Yum” »
Ah yes, Grim (1996). A movie so aptly titled it’s almost a spoiler, except instead of dread and horror, the “grim” part describes the audience’s face once they realize they’ve just blown 90 minutes watching a cave troll that looks like it crawled out of the clearance bin at Party City. This was Paul Matthews’ … Read More “Grim (1996)” »
There are low-budget films, and then there’s Feeders. A movie so cheap it makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Avengers: Endgame. Directed by John and Mark Polonia (the patron saints of Pennsylvania backyard cinema) and co-starring Jon McBride, Feeders is a $500 ode to why camcorders in the ’90s should have come with … Read More “Feeders (1996): The $500 That Should Have Been Spent on Pizza” »
Every horror director has that awkward “high school band demo tape” phase—the project that makes you wonder how they ever got hired again. For Hideo Nakata, the man who would go on to traumatize a generation with Ring, that project is Don’t Look Up (女優霊). Imagine if The Ring had been shot in your uncle’s … Read More “Don’t Look Up (1996)” »
There are bad horror movies, and then there’s The Dentist. A film so utterly ridiculous it makes you want to floss your brain afterward. Directed by Brian Yuzna—yes, the same man who gave us Society (a film about rich people literally eating each other)—this one trades body-melting orgies for the high-stakes terror of… dental hygiene. … Read More “The Dentist (1996) – Open Wide for Mediocrity” »
The Craft (1996) is less a horror movie and more a Hot Topic commercial where someone slipped a witch’s pentagram necklace into the clearance bin next to the chokers. People remember it as a cult classic about witchy empowerment. Me? I remember it as the film where the audience left the theater knowing two things: … Read More “The Craft (1996) – a goth Spice Girls coven: Scary Witch, Sporty Witch, Posh Witch, and Depressed Witch” »
There are two kinds of horror movies in the Children of the Corn franchise: the ones you regret watching immediately, and the ones you regret a few hours later. Miraculously, Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering lands in the rarer third category—the one you actually kind of enjoy, like an accidental road trip detour … Read More “Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996): Naomi Watts vs. Killer Kids and One Hell of a Babysitting Gig” »
There are bad movies. There are fun bad movies. And then there’s Carnosaur 3: Primal Species, a cinematic landfill fire that somehow manages to be boring, confusing, and hilarious all at the same time. By the end of it, I wasn’t sure if I’d watched a dinosaur movie, a half-baked military recruitment ad, or the … Read More “Carnosaur 3: Primal Species” »
Every generation gets its haunted-house TV movie, and in 1996 the gods of basic cable gave us Buried Secrets. It’s got everything a late-night Lifetime rerun requires: family drama, ghostly whisperings, a troubled teen spirit, and of course, a “hot new star” in Tiffani-Amber Thiessen trying desperately to prove she can act in something other … Read More “Buried Secrets (1996) – Or How to Waste Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, a Horse, and 90 Minutes of Your Life” »
There’s a certain masochistic charm in sitting down to watch a Peter Benchley adaptation. Jaws was lightning in a bottle, The Deep was lightning in a soggy bucket, and The Beast—a two-part TV miniseries about a giant squid—is lightning in a burned-out toaster someone left in a rainstorm. The year was 1996, the golden age … Read More “The Beast (1996): The Squid That Ate My Afternoon” »