Yearly Archives: 2023

Hysterics of the Dead in 2003 with Uwe Boll

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Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

If you’re an avid movie goer and movie lover, most of the time you can tell when a movie is going to stink five minute in to it. Sometimes it’s from the first moment, but sometimes it takes at least five minutes. When I trekked to Manhattan to see “House of the Dead” a week before Halloween, it hit like a gut punch within the opening credits that I was not going to see the next zombie movie masterpiece. Granted, this was 2003, and I hadn’t heard of Uwe Boll. Hell, I barely had any knowledge of what “House of the Dead” was as a whole. I just know that the ads for it on MTV looked pretty damn cool.

I was at a weird mind set in 2003. I’d just come out from open heart surgery in July, and I’d spent the entire summer suffering, especially after the historic black out that took out power from most of America for twenty four hours.

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Black Pumpkin (2018)

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I could definitely picture re-watching Ryan McGonagle’s “Black Pumpkin” down the line. If anything it’s so bathed in Halloween ephemera that it’s a decent bit of background sounds for the respective Halloween geek. What holds it back though is that there seems to be so much behind the narrative that we’re not informed on, thus there feels like a big chunk of the intend narrative is either cut out or missing. That’s due to the fact that “Black Pumpkin” is technically a sequel to the 2016 movie “Bloody Bobby,” later-released in 2021 as “The Legend of Fall Creek.”

So, it’s a sequel—kind of. But not really…?

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Pumpkins (2018)

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Director Maria Lee Metheringham’s “Pumpkins” is a film that would have worked so much better as a short form segment in an anthology horror film. As a feature length film, it falls painfully flat. Everything that needs to be resolved about the narrative is literally resolved in the first half hour. Everything else is merely filler that transforms what could have been an interesting revenge tale in to another slasher film.

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Natty Knocks (2023)

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With these indie horror films set during the Autumn or Halloween, the filmmakers often tend to forget that Halloween should be a spice, not the main ingredient. Dwight Little who is mostly famed for delivering “Halloween 4” give us a movie that is in essence a Halloween movie. And it’s a Halloween movie with a pale faced villain. But it’s not a movie with a certain pale faced villain because, you know, copyright and all that. What could have been a great Halloween flavored horror movie is essentially just a chore to sit through.

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Five Great Minority Movie Heroes: October Edition

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It’s spooky season and I thought it’d be a good time to whip out another edition of “Great Minority Movie Heroes” but leaning in to the horror genre. That’s admittedly a hard task, but I listed five really interesting and likable minority movie heroes of the horror genre.

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Barbarian (2022)

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Director Zach Cregger’s horror dark comedy is one of the most unpredictable horror movies I’ve seen in years. After missing it in 2022 due to… circumstances, I’m glad I finally went in to it as blind as humanly possible. It’s a good thing to go in to “Barbarian” blind, because it takes the audience in to twists, turns, and spirals that they simply will not see coming. It begins as one kind of movie, turns in to another kind of movie, and then doesn’t stop shedding its skin to become a completely different kind of beast. 

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