Robert is a tire. Robert is in the ground. Robert gains a consciousness and decides he doesn’t want to be rubble. Robert gets up and starts rolling down the road. He blows things up with its will. It squashes bugs. Now that it’s caught the eye (?) of a gorgeous young traveler, Robert is rolling down after her and is intent on garnering her attention.
Why? No reason.
Does there have to be a reason?
Revenge like anything is best served when in intricate doses. Batman, The Punisher, Freddy Krueger, they didn’t elicit their revenge in bouts of quick murder and or suicide. They instead withheld the final blow for as long as they possibly could and made the experience about as painful and immensely grueling as possible before the final closing shot. That’s the case for “I Saw the Devil” one of the most finely tuned revenge films ever created. It’s not just a movie about a man on a rampage looking for the monster who destroyed his life. It’s about a man embracing his inner most monsters and destroying the life of the man who took great pleasure in ruining his.
You either know it as the title “Secrets of Sex” or the more aptly titled “Bizarre,” as director Antony Balch’s sexploitation horror anthology is clearly a film that lives up to such a title. Synapse re-releases this seventies gem in the guise of a sexploitation movie, but don’t be fooled. It is very much a horror film of the truest nature that’s reliant on the appeal of sexuality to lower the audiences guards. “Secrets of Sex” is such an unusually surreal piece of genre work that uses sex and the awakening of our sexual natures as a tool for incomparable horror. And through that it tells various stories through the mouth of an inexplicably placed mummified corpse that has seen the battle of the sexes waged for too long.
A group of strippers, two hookers, a bouncer, and a pimp run in to a strip club after hours. The start of a funny joke? It’s the premise for “Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!” a surprisingly well made and entertaining horror comedy considering the miniscule budget that it works on from the minute one. Notice how the strip club is the same exterior as the ice rink from the prologue. But who cares? “Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!” is a classic grind house throwback that features a group of mismatched survivors and malcontents going up against an endless horde of the walking dead.
There’s something absolutely genius about director Matthew Kohnen’s horror comedy in which he concocts a formula that’s been done before, and yet feels absolutely brand new. We’ve seen it a thousand times: the government is devising a new toxin for war fare and before they realize it they’ve created a breeding fluid for zombified soldiers. Choosing instead to do away with it, they camouflage the chemical as baby formula and drive it off to a deserted locale. Thanks to inept truck drivers, a barrel falls off the truck and in to a local town behind a bowling alley.
Director Terrence Williams shows real promise on occasion, especially with films like “The Hood Has Eyez,” and with his newest film entitled “Horno,” he has an interesting concept but one that doesn’t pan out to an interesting movie. I wish I could have loved the shameless disgusting tripe that was doled out as something Troma angled, but in the end it’s just a good concept with a pretty faulty delivery. Williams has the right idea by inventing a concept within a concept, almost like a meta-movie, but the fact remains that hornos are a relatively established concept. Joe D’Amato infamously did it with films like “Sexy Erotic Nights of the Living Dead.”
From Anchor Bay Entertainment comes the much touted adaptation one of the most groundbreaking comic books of the new millennium. A thinking man’s horror comic book and teeming with literary value and mainstream appeal, “The Walking Dead” was a series begging to be made in to a big screen version from issue one. Thankfully AMC Networks latched on to the Frank Darabont led production and turned it in to a television series.
What began as a gamble on the horror genre and on a mostly underground comic book, has become a juggernaut that has benefitted the horror community for the better. The highest rated AMC network premiere of all time, and charged by a plethora of seasoned character actors from Jeffrey DeMunn, Laurie Holden and Andrew Lincoln and up and comers like Emma Bell, Jon Bernthal, and Steven Yeun, “The Walking Dead” has been an unstoppable pop culture force.