Tag: 2000s
An above-average direct-to-video urban slasher, Cutthroat Alley is basically Scream in the 'Hood. It borrows liberally from the Wes Craven flick, but what it lacks in originality it makes up for in direction, writing and production value (everything's relative here, folks). The story is a cohesive whodunit with no...
Scarier than "Funky Town," funkier than O-Town, Dark Town is a neat little direct-to-video flick with an interesting premise. Vampires from Bosnia emigrate to the bloodiest place they can find after the genocide ends: Compton. Meanwhile, teen Compton-ite Rakeem (Del Wills) and his buddies decide one night to take...
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about The Dawn is that it resisted the urge to call itself The Blair Witch Projects. The story involves an "urban" (read: black) college professor (Omar Jermaine) bringing a group of black and Latino students to the woods to "experience the...
Led by a take-charge, opinionated black man, a ragtag group of survivors trapped in a building must work together to fend off a horde of flesh-eating zombies. Sound familiar? That's right, it's Day X! This overlooked little zombie independent does an admirable job of channeling the spirit of the...
Looking at the DVD cover, I was prepared to mock this film mercilessly, but it turns out that Dead Heist is the opposite of those direct-to-video dregs that spend three-quarters of their budget on snazzy cover art in order to suck you in and waste two hours of your...
The Quiroz Brothers have unleashed a string of mediocre-at-best horror cheapies over the past few years, but I'll give them credit for one thing: each one has been better than the last. Of course, when you start out with Hood of the Living Dead, there's little place to go...
As straight-to-video zombie films go, Death Valley is one of them. But more than that, it stands out for having two major black characters and an interesting racial subplot involving zombie cowboy Bloody Bill: "The only thing he hated more than Yankees," explains one of the teenaged fodder, "was...
Five delinquent "teens" (Hollywood-speak for 30-something) are sentenced to renovate a brothel-turned-hospital in South Central LA that apparently used to host ritual sacrifices back in the day and is now a portal to the land of the dead frequented by demon ghosts of dead prostitutes. Ho-hum. These sub-par, poseur...
An otherwise inept horror film, Devon's Ghost is noteworthy as one of the rare non-"urban" slashers to star a black woman as the "final girl". The gal in question is Karan Ashley, who also co-wrote, produced and edited the film, which goes a long way to explaining how she...
The latest addition to the black killer doll army is, um, this guy:
Although he'd receive his own film, Ooga Booga, in 2013, in Doll Graveyard, he doesn’t seem to have a name or any real back story other than he belonged to a girl in 1911 and was buried with her when...
