Robert Altman, that beloved patron saint of sprawling ensembles, gave us the chaotic brilliance of M*A*S*H, the glorious mess of Nashville, and the woozy paranoia of The Long Goodbye. Then, for reasons known only to him (and possibly to his therapist), he decided to make a horror film. The result was Images (1972), his one … Read More “Images: Robert Altman Paints a “Small Canvas” and Calls It Horror” »
The early ’70s were a fertile breeding ground for the TV “Movie of the Week”—cheaply made, hastily written, and broadcast in prime time to audiences who had nowhere else to turn in a world with only three channels. Out of this swamp crawled Haunts of the Very Rich (1972), a horror-thriller with a title that … Read More “Haunts of the Very Rich: Dante’s Inferno on a Discount Airline” »
The 1970s were the golden age of eco-horror. Jaws made us fear the ocean, Kingdom of the Spiders made us avoid Arizona, and Long Weekend made us reconsider camping trips. But then there’s Frogs (1972), a movie so inept it could make you root for the pesticide companies. George McCowan’s swamp-bound “thriller” promised amphibian apocalypse, … Read More “Frogs: Nature’s Revenge, or Just a Tadpole of a Movie?” »
Lucio Fulci is remembered today as the “Godfather of Gore,” the man who gave us zombies gnawing eyeballs and maggots raining down like biblical plagues. But before Zombie Flesh Eaters and The Beyond, he crafted Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), perhaps his finest film: a giallo where the horror doesn’t come from stylish masked killers, … Read More “Don’t Torture a Duckling: Fulci’s Masterpiece of Sin, Superstition, and Small-Town Rot” »
There are horror films that scream their intentions, and then there are those that creep along the walls like damp mold, settling into your bones before you even know you’re uncomfortable. Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972), retitled Raw Meat in the U.S. for audiences who presumably wouldn’t watch a film unless it sounded like a … Read More “Death Line: Cannibals, the Tube, and Donald Pleasence’s Drunken Majesty” »
Titles lie. The Cannibal Man promises entrails, feastings, and a Mediterranean buffet of human flesh, but delivers instead something much richer, stranger, and far more unsettling: a slow, suffocating portrait of a man unraveling in Franco-era Spain. There’s no cannibalism here—just murder, madness, and social commentary hidden beneath butcher knives and slaughterhouse hooks. It is … Read More “The Cannibal Man: Eloy de la Iglesia’s Week of the Killer” »
If you thought the 1970s horror boom gave us masterpieces like The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now, you should also know it hatched some cinematic turkeys. None, however, were quite as literal—or as hilariously incompetent—as Blood Freak(1972), a Florida cheapie that dares to ask: “What if Reefer Madness mated with a Thanksgiving dinner and gave … Read More “Blood Freak: The Turkey That Gobbled Cinema” »
By the early ’70s, Amicus Productions had carved itself a niche as Hammer’s scrappier, nastier cousin—the studio that couldn’t afford castles but made up for it with anthologies stuffed with corpses, cobwebs, and character actors who could chew scenery faster than Vincent Price at a buffet. Asylum (1972), retitled in the U.S. as House of … Read More “Asylum: A House of Crazies With Class” »
By the 1970s, Hollywood was still busy flogging the carcass of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? like a stubborn mule that refused to die. The genre was dubbed “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation”—aging actresses shrieking, stabbing, and staggering through melodramas that promised camp thrills and often delivered only embarrassment. Into this blood-spattered subgenre tottered What’s the … Read More “What’s the Matter With Helen?: Hollywood Gothic Served With Too Much Ham” »
Cinema has often warned us about spiders. They crawl into bathtubs, dangle above our heads, and sometimes mutate into skyscraper-sized monsters in 1950s B-pictures. But rarely has a film tangled itself into such a hopeless web of tedium as Peter Sykes’ Venom (1974), also known by the more exotic title The Legend of Spider Forest. … Read More “Venom: When Spiders, Nazis, and Bad Scripts Weave a Web of Pure Nonsense” »