Zombie 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?
Tag Archives: Revenge
The Craft (1996)
The nineties experienced an odd resurgence in the interest of witchcraft for a while. So much so that even I dabbled in it and Paganism for a while. In my ever expanding love for the occult I took to intensive research of the art of witchcraft, and I think it was contagious for a while. There was the hit TV show “Charmed,” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” and of course there were films like “Hocus Pocus,” “Practical Magic,” the revived film version of “The Crucible,” and the rather slick horror drama “The Craft” to help induce the interest in the apparent appeal of the religion. While somewhat fading in to obscurity, it’s still an utterly mesmerizing teen oriented horror thriller and one painfully copied in “The Covenant.”
Creepshow (1982)
George A. Romero’s “Creepshow” is almost a spit in the face of everyone who decried comic books a sheer stain on humanity and the youth, blaming the colored pages for the evaporation of morality in the fifties and sixties. “Creepshow” is an absolute celebration of horror comics and a love letter to the EC generation who had their stories robbed by hack psychologists who blamed comic books for homosexuality, crime, murder, and drug use. “Creepshow” is a joint effort from many people just filled with talent that simply can not hold this entire film at times. An absolute orgy of laughs, scares, and thrills, “Creepshow” is one of the finest, if not the finest anthology horror film second only to “Black Sabbath.”
Valentine (2001)
Taking every bit and piece it can from “Slaughter High,” 2001’s painfully bland and tedious “Valentine” examines what happens when you fuck a nerd in the ass. At a school dance for Valentine’s Day, young Jeremy Melton experiences endless rejection from his classmates during the dance and braves the social experience anyway. After young Dorothy Wheeler sets him up to become the target of school bullies, Jeremy is never heard from again and becomes fodder for the group of girls later in their lives. I always assumed horror films were supposed to focus on likable characters. If not, there should be at least one or two likable characters you can connect with. “Valentine” works against such an effort focusing on four of the most vapid and utterly despicable young girls ever written, all of whom are stuck up rich snobs just asking to be brutally slaughtered.
Truth or Die (2012) (DVD)
Director Robert Heath creates a horror film that starts out like “Slaughter High” and ends like “Saw.” Basically, “Truth or Die” is a revenge film of the twisted kind where no one is truly just. In the end, it’s about despicable people hurting despicable people. As is the trend with most modern revenge tales, “Truth or Die” is about the destruction of revenge and how nothing is ever as it seems.
Red Hood Traps the Wolf in His Own Game.
“Why don’t you just kill me?”
“Is that what you think I want?”
Though described as a “thriller,” this is a horror movie in the purest sense, and an emotionally draining one at that. A man engages in a horrible crime, thinks he’s gotten away with it and discovers he’s being outwitted, outsmarted, and tortured by a vindictive little bitch about half his size.
The irony being that the character Jeff is a good looking man with the ability to pick up any woman he wants and he chooses young children, and yet he’s not above spouting the same crap excuses we hear from all pedophiles, too.
Slade’s film is indeed a horror movie. And then I had to see “Hostel Part II” to review, and it was pretty much the same experience as the first time.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
After watching the incredibly over the top performances in “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” I’m suddenly not so shocked that subsequent this film, the four stars of this slasher never actually amounted to much cinematically. Not to be cruel or anything, but where as most slashers suffer from an abundance of bad acting, this film attempts to sap melodramatic performances from its four stars. That means a lot of shouting, and screaming, and attempted self-aware jabs at the horror genre. Ryan Phillippe in particular sounds like he’s auditioning for drama class as the testosterone laced Barry who runs around screeching at every character for the first fifteen minutes of the film. The incredibly loose almost pointless adaptation of the Lois Duncan novel “I Know What You Did Last Summer” stars a cadre of nineties stars trying their best to mine the gold left behind by Kevin Williamson’s “Scream.”