Halloween (1978)
As lean and efficient a piece of genre filmmaking as you’re going to find, which makes sense since director John Carpenter has often said he wished he had been alive and working as a director in the 1940s when narratively fat-free film noirs were everpresent. There’s obviously a lot I like about this horror classic,
The Wolfman (2010)
This stately, old fashioned update of the classic horror tale received a rude box office and critical reception a decade ago, but it’s actually a bit better than its extremely poor reputation. Benicio Del Toro stars as Lawrence Talbot, a Shakespearean actor whose brother may have perished at the hands (or, I guess, claws) of
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
A rather (unintentionally?) amusing attempt to remove invincible, hockey-masked serial killer Jason Voorhees from the rural confines of Camp Crystal Lake and place him in a grimy, pre-gentrified New York City. That gimmick alone – the sight of seeing the linebacker-looking horror icon skulking around in Times Square, smashing a new wave punk rocker’s boombox
Messiah of Evil (1973)
A dated, slow-moving horror movie very much of its time that has, perhaps due to the dreamlike visuals and general weirdness of the presentation, been positively re-evaluated in recent years. The premise should be familiar to those who have watched a lot of similar films: a young woman travels to a sleepy seaside town in
Intersect (2020)
An earnest but amateurish and extremely slow-moving attempt to incorporate hard science in a genre movie framework, as evidenced by the casting of Britsh ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in a voice role. The story has something to do with some smarty-pants scientists at Miskatonic University (notice the rather obvious nod to H.P. Lovecraft)