A Frat Party From Hell (But Not in the Fun Way) Slasher movies are supposed to be scary, sexy, or at least gloriously stupid. Pledge Night somehow manages to be none of the above while still asking you to sit through ninety minutes of hazing rituals and Anthrax riffs. This is the kind of movie … Read More “Pledge Night (1990) – When Hazing Becomes a Horror Movie, and Horror Becomes a Hazing” »
Remakes are tricky business. For every The Thing or The Fly, you get fifty cinematic misfires where studios attempt to resell nostalgia like reheated leftovers. Enter Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead (1990), a remake of George A. Romero’s 1968 classic that manages to prove once and for all: you can’t improve on perfection—especially … Read More “Night of the Living Dead (1990) – A Shuffling Disappointment” »
There are bad horror films, and then there is Night Killer. Directed by Claudio Fragasso, the same visionary responsible for Troll 2—a film so legendarily awful it achieved immortality—Night Killer proves that lightning can, in fact, strike twice in the exact same dumpster. This is a movie that was promoted as Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 … Read More “Night Killer (1990): A Slasher in Search of a Franchise and Its Own Dignity” »
Ah, the 1990s. The slasher genre was limping along like a wounded camp counselor after Jason Voorhees got through with them, and yet out of the fog came The Night Brings Charlie. A small, scrappy little slasher directed by Tom Logan, written by Bruce Carson, and carried on the sweaty shoulders of a man in … Read More “The Night Brings Charlie (1990) — The Burlap Sack of Dreams” »
When Stephen King Met Rob Reiner in a Dark Alley Stephen King has written about possessed cars, evil clowns, and demonic laundry machines, but nothing in his career has ever matched the sheer, domestic, suffocating terror of Misery. No ghosts. No vampires. Just a snowstorm, a broken author, and the kind of fan mail that … Read More “Misery (1990) – The Best Love Letter a Sledgehammer Ever Wrote” »
Some films are made to win Oscars. Others are made to sell popcorn. And then there are films like Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor, which exists purely to remind you that life is short, science is dangerous, and sometimes it’s okay to cheer when an alien turns a guy into space chutney. Billed as The Deadly … Read More “Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (1990): When Science Meets Slime and Everyone Loses Their Lunch” »
Some movies are so bad they circle around to genius. Others are so bad they sink straight into cinematic quicksand, never to be seen again unless you’ve got a cursed VHS collection. Metamorphosis—or, if you’re feeling European, DNA Formula Letale—falls into the latter camp. Directed by Luigi Montefiori (a.k.a. George Eastman), this 1990 “sci-fi horror” … Read More “Metamorphosis (1990) — When Dinosaurs Ruled the Screen… Very, Very Badly” »
When Twin Peaks Meets Twin Creeps Sherilyn Fenn deserves better. That sentence alone could serve as the entire review, but let’s stretch this out because Meridian is the cinematic equivalent of a wine-stained romance paperback left in the bargain bin too long. Charles Band, the same man who blessed the world with murderous puppets in … Read More “Meridian: Kiss of the Beast – Beauty and the Beast Meets a Discount Harlequin Novel” »
There are horror sequels, and then there are horror sequels that feel like somebody ran a chainsaw through the script, sewed it back together with dental floss, and declared it art. Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III proudly falls into the latter category—a film so confused, so bland, and so aggressively pointless it makes The Texas … Read More “Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) – 1000 Words of Chainsaw Regret” »
There are movies you watch, and then there are movies that watch you, slowly siphoning away your will to live. Jacob’s Ladder is firmly in the latter category. It’s a psychological horror film from Adrian Lyne—the same guy who made Fatal Attraction—so you’d think this would at least be sexy paranoia with bunny-boiling theatrics. Instead, … Read More “Jacob’s Ladder (1990): Or, How to Have a Nervous Breakdown for Two Hours Without Popcorn” »