Tag: remakes
The original Terror Train is generally considered a cornerstone of the Golden Age of slashers—and, along with Halloween, The Fog and Prom Night, is one-fourth of the quartet of films that turned Jamie Lee Curtis into a scream queen—so it’s surprising that it took until 2022 for it to...
Having rewatched the original Jacob’s Ladder recently, I found that, although the whole “shaky head” effect has become something of a horror cliche over the years, it holds up well as a visually striking and narratively challenging -- but ultimately rewarding -- paranoid thriller with a poignant emotional core....
I will go to my grave saying that The Blob is one of the best horror movies of the 1980s. It combines the throwback alien invasion mayhem of the 1950s with the grisly creature feature effects of the '80s and tosses in some fun, Spielbergian adventure overtones to boot....
If you blinked, you probably missed the black guy in the original Rosemary's Baby: D'Urville Martin (later a Blaxploitation regular in films like Dolemite, Hell Up in Harlem, Hammer and Five on the Black Hand Side) as Diego, the hotel operator in the notorious apartment building The Bramford. The...
It should go without saying that portrayals of black characters in horror movies can stand to improve, but on the bright side, they aren't as bad as they've been in the past. Compare the original King Kong to 2017's Kong: Skull Island, for instance (acknowledging that films like these...
Horror remakes are all the rage these days, so in some ways, the 1990 Night of the Living Dead "redux" was ahead of its time. Sure, the George Romero original is a classic, and a remake could never recapture its magic, but this version, directed by special effects legend...
Ritual feels about as much like a Tales from the Crypt film as Def By Temptation felt like a Troma film -- that is, not at all. With barely a hint of the humor or the gore (aside from a grisly opening scene) that marked the excellent Demon Knight...
Like many people, I thoroughly ignored the Children of the Corn remake once the label "SyFy original" was slapped on it, but when I finally got around to watching it, I almost dropped my hot wings: Holy Halle Berry! There's a black chick playing the Linda Hamilton role! Indeed, there...
The Devil's Daughter is an all-black melodramatic semi-remake of Ouanga with no devil and with daughters so bland the devil wouldn't want 'em anyway. The whispy-voiced Ida James stars as vapid heiress Sylvia Walton, who inherits a Jamaican plantation worked by "Jamaicans" without a hint of patois. Her half-sister...
Sleepover at the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane? Count me in! House on Haunted Hill was one of the first in a glut of glossy remakes of horror classics that came out in the late '90s and into the 21st century, and it's still one of the...
