Sequels are supposed to expand, deepen, or at least cash in on the charm of the original. Child’s Play 2 manages to do none of these. Instead, it picks up where the first film left off, dusts off the homicidal cabbage patch reject known as Chucky, and throws him into yet another round of hide-and-stab … Read More “Child’s Play 2 (1990): When Dolls Attack… Again” »
When Horror Eats Its Own Brain By 1990, Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci was tired, cranky, and apparently bored of directing zombies gnawing intestines for the tenth time. So what did he do? He made Cat in the Brain, a movie about himself losing his mind because he makes too many violent horror movies. In … Read More “Cat in the Brain (1990) – Review Lucio Fulci Films Lucio Fulci Watching Lucio Fulci Go Insane, and Somehow It’s Still Less Entertaining Than a Cat Video” »
Frank Darabont is remembered for giving us The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist. But long before he mastered Stephen King adaptations and the art of prestige misery, he directed a made-for-TV horror-thriller called Buried Alive. It’s a film that proves you don’t need a giant budget or an Oscar-bait script to tell … Read More “Buried Alive (1990)” »
It takes a special kind of cinematic genius to take the work of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most influential horror writers in history, and turn it into something that feels less like gothic terror and more like a made-for-TV after-school special that forgot what genre it was supposed to be. Enter Buried Alive, … Read More “Buried Alive (1990): Poe Must Be Spinning in His Coffin” »
There are films that get under your skin. Brain Dead doesn’t just get under your skin—it crawls into your skull, rearranges the furniture, and leaves you wondering if you’ve been lobotomized by VHS static. Adam Simon’s 1989 psychological horror-thriller, starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, wants to be a trippy meditation on sanity, corporate greed, … Read More “Brain Dead (1989): A Headache in Cinematic Form” »
A Hunter’s Moon, a Blood Moon, and a Total Waste of Time Let’s not mince words: Bloodmoon is the kind of film that makes you nostalgic for actual detention. An Australian Catholic school slasher with barbed wire garrotes, unconvincing teen angst, and teachers who behave like they’re auditioning for Days of Our Lives instead of … Read More “Bloodmoon (1990) – Review Catholic School Confidential: When Ozploitation Finally Ran Out of Beer Money” »
If you ever wanted to see The Bad News Bears spliced with I Spit on Your Grave, shot on a beer budget, and directed by someone who thought feminism meant “give the ladies baseball bats, then have them chased by hillbillies,” Blood Gamesis your nightmare come true. It’s the kind of exploitation film that sounds … Read More “Blood Games (1990)” »
Sometimes a horror movie manages to sneak under your skin. Baby Blood, Alain Robak’s French body-horror curiosity from 1990, doesn’t sneak so much as it belly-flops into your bloodstream like a drunken parasite, splashing gore everywhere and hoping you mistake incoherence for art. Spoiler: you don’t. This is the kind of film that wants to … Read More “Baby Blood (1990): A Parasite in the Womb, and in the Script” »
The Amityville franchise is like a cursed dollhouse: every time you think you’ve closed the door, some new installment crawls out of the attic with another pointless story. By the time we reach The Amityville Curse (1990), the fifth entry, the series has already given us a haunted house, a haunted clock, a haunted lamp, … Read More “The Amityville Curse (1990): The Horror of Watching Paint Dry, Now With Ghosts” »
It takes a special kind of movie to ruin Christmas Eve and make you afraid of Victorian wallpaper, but the 1989 TV adaptation of The Woman in Black manages exactly that. This isn’t your average “boo!” haunted house ride. No, this is the kind of slow-burn dread that seeps into your bones like damp English … Read More “The Woman in Black (1989)” »