Tag: campy
Cinema in 2023 boasted a slew of surprise hits and surprise flops, but one constant was the Black presence in horror. Not necessarily a year of earth-shattering accomplishments, 2023 was for Black horror more about consistency and variety, broadening the typical Black roles into period pieces, ghost stories, mad...
Ostensibly a forgettable creature feature, Scared to Death is noteworthy as an egregious case of W.M.H.S. (White Male Hero Syndrome). That’s when an otherwise bland, unlikable, undeserving character is elevated to hero status just because he’s a White man -- sort of like how Rudy Giuliani became "America's Mayor"...
Say what you will about The Asylum -- the poor quality of their films, their willingness to coast off the notoriety of bigger, better movies with “mockbusters” like Snakes on a Train and Independents' Day, the fact that their Sharknado films opened the floodgates for every Tom, Dick and...
Originally titled Guardian of Eden, The Good Wifey changed its name presumably to capitalize on the success of the TV show The Good Wife, even though the first title actually makes more sense for the story. It features a character named Eden, after all -- a little girl who’s...
Even though we're well into the 21st century, it's still disturbingly rare to find a black person playing the primary villain in a horror movie -- despite the fact that black is overwhelmingly the skin color of choice for anonymous gang members and thugs in any genre. Why would...
African-American actress Paulene Myers has a small but pivotal role in this schlocky B-movie that's a "meta" semi-sequel to I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and revolves around the (fictional) makeup artist (Robert H. Harris) who created the creatures for those two films. When...
In between the 1958 original The Blob and the 1988 remake The Blob was Beware! The Blob, a goofy '70s sequel that stands out for little more than being an early example of what would later become a horror cliché: the black guy dying first.
In truth, black characters in...
The relatively obscure Mexican-Cuban production Yambaó seems to be lumped into the horror genre because of its elements of voodoo/Santeria and spirit possession, but frankly, it deals with those subjects in such a matter-of-fact manner (perhaps reflecting the level of cultural belief that these types of events are real...
Revolving around a series of deaths in a health club and featuring lines like "I'm Beta, and you're VHS," Death Spa is a movie that's so '80s, it's got Drakkar Noir seeping from its pores -- which is odd, because according to IMDb, it actually wasn't released until 1990...
The Sharknado series began as a charmingly low-brow, tongue-in-cheek sendup of the disaster and killer animal movies you can catch on SyFy every weekend. It was initially innocuous, relatively low-key camp, but over time, the series has bought into its own viral appeal and now tries way too hard...
