Retro Slashers

Cheryl (Ayn Ruymen), on the run after stealing her roomate’s cash, hides out at the King Edward Hotel run by her creepy Aunt Martha (Lucille Benson).  Other tenants include a kinky priest (Laurie Main) and George (John Ventantonio), a sinister photographer with a nasty addiction to blow-up dolls.  At night Cheryl hears mysterious noises coming [...]

Happy Hell Night missed the slasher frenzy by almost a decade but it’s still a pretty good attempt at a straightforward horror movie. As legend has it, twenty-five years ago seven students were slaughtered by a seemingly unstoppable force named Malius (Charles Cragin). The survivors - a student (played by a very young Sam Rockwell) and [...]

1989 was full of uncertainty. Like George Michael’s sexuality for instance, and this oddball black comedy slasher.
Offerings was a regional horror movie shot in Oklahoma and is a total rip-off of Halloween. However, it also likens itself to Rob Zombie’s remake by giving the killer a motive. It’s also a little bit like Prom Night, [...]

It’s the near future and young adults are divided into two factions: the ‘Frats’, the privileged college upperclass, and the poverty-stricken ‘Mutants’, a society of punk protestors. We start out with each group separately but in mirrored situations – a pack of ‘bad’ frat members are in trouble for repeated pranks on a ‘good’ frat, [...]

David Hess was no stranger to the world of celluloid horror when he stepped behind the camera for his directorial debut (and swan song as of this printing). As an actor he made us cringe as Krug, the scariest of the hoodlums featured in Last House on the Left and his rapist take on Of [...]

Once upon a time there was this bodybuilding guru named Jake. Jake Steinfeld actually, but he went by Body by Jake and built an empire as trainer to the stars. He was rumored to be the only man to make Steven Spielberg throw up. There’s just a touch of irony that he caused such mayhem [...]

I don’t know why when horror fanatics hear the word “obscure” they think they have to see that movie! I mean, maybe it’s obscure for a reason! It’s kind of a sickness we have, to hunt down the rarest of horror, especially slashers. Goes to prove that we are a passionate bunch. But are we also [...]

You have to hand it to Amsterdamned – it’s got one hell of a gimmick. By 1988, the slasher genre had given us killers who hid their faces behind hockey masks, gasmasks, clown masks, William Shatner masks, owl masks, pillow cases, chunks of stitched-together human skin… It was only a matter of time before one [...]

Usually a lost slasher finally getting released makes a few headlines but here’s one that has gone mostly unnoticed. The S.O.V. Beauty Queen Butcher, filmed way back in 1991, wasn’t released until 2007 by Camp Motion Pictures as part of their Retro 80s Horror Collection. Phyllis Loden (Rhona Brody) is a [...]

*Note: I wrote this review before Code Red’s release of this incredible film.
For those of you unaware of who exactly to blame for the shot-on-video sub-genre, look no further than director David Wintergate who made the first SOV flick, Boardinghouse. It would be easy enough to attack the poor Mr. Wintergate for creating such [...]

“Schizoid” feels like a violent slasher made for the Lifetime network.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. That automatically separates it from the pack and creates the illusion you are watching something new, when in fact it is just a melodramatic horror picture that transports you back to that bygone era of Grindhouse fun, minus [...]

Sometimes slasher films fail to live up to their titles – The Toolbox Murders, The Driller Killer, Nail Gun Massacre and countless others were nothing more than yawn-inducing drivel.

After three successful, if somewhat critically mauled, feature films, Paramount finally decided to lay their lucrative Friday the 13th franchise to rest with what promised to be The Final Chapter.

By the mid-nineties, the slasher film seemed like a bad dream. ‘Horror’ had become a dirty word and filmmakers were instead producing what had become known as ‘psychological thrillers.’

Throughout his half a century career, Alfred Hitchcock had always resisted directing a sequel.