If you’ve seen Nacho Vigalondo films like Colossal, Extraterrestrial, Timecrimes and Open Windows, you know he’s not one for conventional genre storytelling. His movies tend toward the unpredictable, either in content or structure -- or both -- and his latest, Pooka!, is no exception. That said, perhaps the most surprising...
The British film Writers Retreat feels like a throwback -- somewhere between a more violent Agatha Christie murder mystery and a less stylized giallo -- but one progressive element it has going for it is the fact that the main protagonist is black. And gay. So, you know, two...
Genre films about supernatural Nazi evildoings have been around since King of the Zombies (released during the Nazi regime of the 1940s, before the US even entered WWII), but they've exploded in number in the 21st century, headed by the likes of Hellboy, Dead Snow, Outpost, Frankenstein's Army, Iron...
Party Day Massacre Stories is a movie in the same way that I would be a surgeon if I were to sneak into a hospital, steal some scrubs and haphazardly dig around a patient's chest cavity with a can opener. Yes, I'm technically performing an operation, but no one...
There's something universal about the nightmarish thrill of watching someone being eaten alive by reanimated corpses that has led to the propagation of zombie movies around the world. I've seen living dead films from six of the seven continents, and frankly, I can't say with 100% certainty there isn't...
The original Tales from the Hood arrived in the midst of the "urban" cinema movement of the '90s, providing a genre spin on the racial and social consciousness of trailblazers like Spike Lee, John Singleton and Julie Dash. More than two decades later, as social consciousness has evolved into...
An unnamed war-torn region of West Africa becomes home to atrocities beyond any it has ever witnessed when the dead begin to rise and consume the living. Amidst the chaos, an American military engineer named Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman) boards the last evacuation flight out of the area, only...
When red-hot indie studio A24 -- home to award winners like Moonlight, Room and Lady Bird and acclaimed genre fare like Hereditary, The Witch and It Comes at Night -- revealed that it was releasing a horror-comedy starring Chance "the Rapper" Bennett and Zazie Beetz, I was understandably pumped....
Square-jawed white guy Jake (Andrew Brooks Gagne) is having a bad day. First, he wakes up late for his job interview. Then, his car won't start, so he hops a train...and immediately falls asleep, missing his stop. Did I mention he’s also forgotten his phone? It seems punctuality and...
The Vampire's Ghost is a vintage horror movie from Republic Pictures that, like most horror movies from Republic Pictures, has slipped through the cracks of public consciousness, overshadowed by Universal's classic monsters. That doesn't mean they aren't quality films, though. Take The Vampire's Ghost, for instance. Not only is it...
