If there’s one complaint I can lobby at “Under the Dark Wing” is that I really would have loved ten more minutes for exposition. Director Christopher DiNunzio unfolds an interesting story with considerable ambiguity that audiences might enjoy, but I think ten minutes more would have lent the film more dread. In either case, “Under the Dark Wing” is still an eerie and fascinating horror drama that focuses on dread placing it front and center.
Art by Chris LaBrenz
There’s been rumors of a horror movie expendables in the works, and it’s one we hope will be so much better than the actual expendables movies. Since we loved the idea we thought it’d be a good idea to cast a team of horror heroes and anti-heroes we think would be best suited for a horror expendables team. We teamed up with Brian Pittman from Batman’s Got a Nosebleed to cast our own picks on who should be battling pure evil when no one else wants to step up.
I mean, picking your own squad of kick-ass horror characters to take on all comers? That’s something we can get behind whole-heartedly. But we weren’t ready for how genuinely hard this actually was. We have redone these lists several times because we kept feeling unsure of who should be on it. There are so many amazing horror heroes and heroines! And we’re picking six of them? Oy, this was a task we truly were never prepared for. But we did it, finding six characters a piece from horror who we think could stand up against pretty much anything. Well, maybe now Godzilla, but he’s not really horror. If he was horror, he’d be on the squad.
So, there they are, our squads of horror heroes to face on the throes of evil that may stalk their way. We’d trust them with our lives and we hope you dig our choices. Who would be in your Horror Expendables?
It’s pretty sad when you sit through a horror movie and the only thing you can take away is the delight of seeing another talented “Degrassi” alum taking on the horror genre. Chloe Rose was one of my favorite characters of the series, and its fun to see her tackling more complex material. “Hellions” is ultimately a mixed bag that presents brief glimmers of greatness, but constantly stumbles in to sheer mediocrity and incoherency. To make matters worse, the film ends without any real clarification of what we’d just seen. Bruce McDonald seems to be building up to something, but then just shuts the film down before we can make sense of anything we’d just seen.
For some people Halloween is a state of mind and not just a holiday. For the Counelis family, it’s a yearly ritual that begins in the middle of the year and ends when November finally rears its head. It’s refreshing to see a documentary that’s more grounded and down to Earth, and much like films like “American Scream,” Paul Counelis documents his family’s journey to build and construct a haunted house mainly because they want to give their neighbors some memories. Surely there’s a profit to be had by a haunted attraction, but that’s not what the holiday means to Paul Counelis and his large family.
I’m enjoying the rush of Halloween themed movies coming to theaters thanks to talented and ambitious filmmakers. If there’s any holiday deserving of a sub-genre it’s Halloween. “Tales of Halloween” is a near perfect anthology horror film that embraces the holiday and uses it as fuel to tell some weird, wild, creepy tales all set around a small town celebrating the wicked holiday. Much like “Terror Tract” and “Trick r Treat,” the anthology is set around a small suburb where inexplicably terrifying and nasty things happen on the holiday. Like “Trick r Treat,” most of the stories connect with each other and garner references to the former tale. It assures that audiences will have to watch the film over and over to catch every Easter Egg thrown to us.
We cap off Halloween Horror Month 2014 by celebrating Day of the Dead with “The Top 10 Greatest Zombies” Part Two. Felix Vasquez Jr. offers his top five Zombie Slayers to take on the nasty horde of the sometimes evil, sometimes misunderstood walkers.