Zombie Night (2013)

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Felix Vasquez

Director John Gulager is not above making entertaining horror films, as we saw with “Feast,” but his offering for the current zombie movie craze ends up being surprisingly conventional and dull. It doesn’t really offer anything new or unique in terms of the zombie movie realm, and to make things worse there are just too many sub-plots. We literally follow almost a dozen characters and their efforts to make it through the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, and beyond their efforts to stay alive, there’s not a lot to them or their personalities.

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Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Felix Vasquez

When Dracula tells you there’s trouble afoot, you should probably listen. “Howling 2” is a sequel to the Joe Dante film because, I guess it has something resembling werewolves in it somewhere. There’s Sybil Danning boiling the screen with her sexiness, and a legion of werewolves, there’s Sybil Danning completely re-defining the term skin tight, and the theme song. I have to say, as a kid who grew up with horror movies that mostly ranged from the eighties, the theme song by Stephen W. Parsons is haunting, and has been burned in to my brain since I was in the single digits age range.

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Howling III – The Marsupials (1987)

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Felix Vasquez

It’s really tough to make sense of “The Marsupials,” but much like the second film, it has a good idea but a terrible execution. It wants to be a psychological thriller, a horror romance, a satire of horror movies, and a werewolf picture all in one and fails to deliver on these aspects two fold. “The Marsupials” garners too much of a narrative for one picture, and should have been spread out in to another film, altogether. One thing is for certain: The connection to the Joe Dante film stops at the fact that it has werewolves in it.

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Return of the Horror Anthology

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Felix Vasquez

Anthologies have always been a favorite of mine. They’re usually a very entertaining source of storytelling that works more toward the horror genre, providing films like “Black Sabbath” and the series “The Twilight Zone.” Both genre fixtures changed my view of horror and storytelling altogether. After the eighties boom of anthology series and films, the anthology unfortunately peaked after “Tales from the Crypt” ended and suffered a sad death. The occasional gem like “Campfire Tales” popped up directly to video, while shows like “Night Visions” and “Ghost Stories” brought excellent horror entertainment only to be cancelled and tucked away in to obscurity.

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Axed (2012)

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Felix Vasquez

For a film called “Axed,” I was expecting something really dark and gruesome, and yet in the end I didn’t realize how trying Ryan Lee Driscoll’s horror drama would be. It’s a practice in tedium and boredom, with a mean spirit that is often very forced. If that’s not enough the direction leaves much to be desired with a series of performances that are sub-par at best. It’s a despicable film about a despicable man, torturing despicable people for no real reason, when it all boils down to it.

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Fright Night (1985)

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Felix Vasquez

If you’re going to be a derivative movie, don’t hide it. Flaunt it, own it, and be able to take the premise you’re deriving from and twist in to something excellent. “Fright Night” does the very thing. What if, instead of a murderer, the next door neighbor was a vampire? And what if, instead of a disabled man, we featured a young high school boy with a bad habit for snooping? And what if, instead of a photographer, this character was a horror fan whose imagination may or may not be playing tricks on him?

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Fright Night Part 2 (1988)

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Felix Vasquez

Apparently Jerry Dandridge from “Fright Night” had a sister. And she’s pissed that Charlie Brewster killed him. She plans to get revenge on him by tracking him down, taking residence in the same building he resides in, and staging one of the most convoluted revenge plans ever written. She wants to turn Charlie in to a vampire, but then she also wants him to believe that he’s going crazy. She shows him that she’s a vampire quite often, but also wants him to think that she’s merely just a stage performer and Charlie is going nuts because–well–going crazy makes the blood sweeter?

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