The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

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We’ve all seen it so many times that I kind of get angry when a filmmaker sends me their latest horror opus and it’s comprised of the same premise. A bunch of teenagers have commandeered a cabin in the woods for the weekend, and decide that they want to get away for a few days of beer drinking and misdeeds of the sexual nature. While there they discover that the cabin houses a bunch of secrets that could be their undoing. And it’s all being manipulated by a secret government lab hidden underneath the cabin, manipulating every single moment of their weekend like a game of chess. Ah, but that’s not the whole story.

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Haunted High (2012)

Haunted-HighZombie frogs, demonic exercise machines, ghostly sports jerseys, and evil toilets, they’re all here to be about as moronic as possible in one of the least scary movies I’ve ever seen. RL Stine in his days of “Goosebumps” drew more chills from me than “Haunted High” a film so laughably bad, it’s almost impossible to watch in one sitting. It basically has everything a bad horror film should have. Special effects so bad they seem to have been created in the mid-eighties, a villain so non-threatening he barely registers above a yawn in the spook meter, and did I mention genre favorite Charisma Carpenter gets top billing for a role that’s literally only thirty seconds in length?

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C.H.U.D. II – Bud the Chud (1989)

chud2When I was a kid I was frightened of pretty much any movie that featured the walking dead, and surely enough my fright was induced whenever I watched “CHUD II.” I can fondly remember re-watching this movie on the now defunct “Monsters HD” cable channel in America three years ago and gazing in disbelief at this absurd and unfunny zombie movie. I was horrified of this? Seriously? “CHUD II” is a travesty not just because it’s an unfunny horror comedy, and not just because it’s not an actual sequel to “CHUD” at all. But because it’s a pretty blatant rip-off of “Return of the Living Dead” with brain eating intelligent zombies taking center stage, and even featuring a zombie dog who rolls with the group of zombies throughout the film.

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An American Werewolf in London (1981)

anamericanwerewolf“An American Werewolf in London” is almost the perfect horror comedy and romance that never quite relies on either genre to move its story and deliver its horror. That’s pretty shocking considering John Landis was often a director known for comedies. Occasionally dark and almost always adult, Landis was once a man known for rich and iconic comedy films. “Animal House” and “The Kentucky Fried Movie.” Need I say more? With “An American Werewolf in London,” the stark comedy can often incite laughter, but it’s so dark it almost feels like awkward laughter most of the time. It’s just uncomfortable laughter because when there’s a laugh to be had, it’s at the expense of someone or something gruesome. When something is horrific it has a true sense of humanity behind it and there isn’t a cheap play for gross out sequences.

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An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)

werewolf-in-parisThis movie proves without a doubt that just because you have a snazzy set of computers and artists, doesn’t mean you can replicate good old fashioned special effects. Sometimes the actual material and human actors can be much more effective than dapper computer animation that, even in 1997, looked like cut scenes from a Playstation video game. Of course it’s not like studios ever really learned their lesson after “An American Werewolf in Paris” landed with a thud in 1997. They just tried and tried until they succeeded. Supposedly in development for six years, “An American Werewolf in Paris” feels as if someone had the bright idea to remake the John Landis eighties classic “An American Werewolf in London,” backed out, and then kicked up production again once computer technology advanced. And then somewhere along the line a remake of a classic horror comedy became a stale and brutally underwhelming horror comedy that failed to amount to even an ounce of the charisma and brilliance that the first film did.

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Mockingbird Lane

This is one of the few times where my fandom has kind of come back to bite me in the ass. I am a fan of “The Munsters” and from day one was opposed to this radical reworking of the series. The darkly comic tone with a violent dramatic atmosphere made me irritated beyond belief. “Mockingbird Lane” surprising enough ends up being a wonderful re-imagining of the series that doesn’t quite alter the comic tone of the original series so much as it adds a lot of menace to it. Instead of a sitcom it’s a dark comedy drama, and instead of the eccentric tone there’s a more menacing and brooding color palette. What makes this special even better is that it completely changes the dynamic of the Munster  family.

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Scary "The Simpsons" Episodes Not Affiliated With Halloween

So, you’ve seen all of the “Treehouse of Horror” episodes, including the newest one on FOX that was… okay, and you still want to see The Simpsons, but with episodes that are horror themed. We have ten episodes from The Simpsons that have nothing to do with Halloween but are very much steeped in horror, or mystery and will whet your appetite for the genre. Even when the Simpsons aren’t delivering their yearly “Treehouse of Horror” episode, they’re still churning out atmospheric episodes filled with elements from the genre that are often excellent and entertaining. Here are ten stands outs.
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