The mission statement from the Bleeding Skull website is to review only horror and trash films from the 80’s, and they’d be mostly films you never heard of, before. After compiling hundreds of reviews based on films from the 1980’s that almost no one would ever bother with, “Bleeding Skull” finally releases a compilation of some of their best written reviews of pure eighties junk.
I’m sure National Geographic would love viewers to believe that “American Blackout” is exactly what would happen during a week long black out in America, but while the film itself is an entertaining horror film, it’s played mostly for shock value. Truly, “American Blackout” is fact based, presenting facts about our current emergency preparedness in America, but the narrative plays it to extremes. In either case, “American Blackout” does offer the notion that we’re screwed if we ever had a national catastrophe. Even in 2003 when the entire North American grid went dark, the US Government didn’t change their system, and won’t invest time in fortifying the power grid for the sake of emergencies.
Director Jim Wynorski offers up a sometimes clever, but inferior follow up to the original Robert Englund film, that doesn’t really advance the narrative so much as it treads water. Rather than explore the themes of the apocalypse, and the eventual war of good and evil dictated by the hotline, we’re once again subjected to a tale about the hotline wreaking havoc.
Seven years after his adopted father failed to murder him and spare the world many lives, Damien now lives with his uncle and aunt. A famous industrialist, Richard Thorn is played with great zeal by William Holden, who is wonderful as the well meaning uncle of Damien who is seemingly the first among his family to realize who and what Damien is. “Damien: Omen II” is considered the lesser of the trilogy, and while it has its problem it’s a generally entertaining and creepy thriller. It just can sadly never get over one hurdle: How did Damien forget he was the anti-christ?
Director Richard Donner’s “The Omen” is the fall out of the success of “The Exorcist.” And while it does subscribe to the evil child formula that became prominent after the success of the William Friedkin movie, it doesn’t try to top the former in terror. “The Omen” reaches for heights of slow boil horror followed by immediate shocks, and even for a film once considered a wannabe of “The Exorcist” it stands alone as a wonderful horror thriller.
To Robert Englund’s credit, he might not have carved out a career as a film director, but “976-Evil” is like an extended EC Comic segment. It’s colored wonderfully, the direction is quite excellent, and Englund is able to create a bleak revenge horror film that ends on a note suggesting a wider story at hand. It’s too bad the sequel didn’t expand on these ideas, in spite of its guilty pleasure status.
Perhaps it’s because I’m just a slasher geek, maybe it’s because I’m basically forgiving when it comes to the Halloween series, but I’m not typically in agreement when people call “Halloween: Resurrection” the worst Halloween sequel primarily because as a standalone tale it would work as a wicked slasher film and thriller. This is an installment that arrived at the cusp of the reality television craze, and deep down it feels as if someone took a screenplay for another horror film and tagged buffers to connect it to the prior “Halloween” films and it shows often with a narrative that is seemingly disconnected from the rest of the series beyond the prologue.