Retro Slashers

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During the clever (and inexpensive) opening credit sequence we learn about a once booming Colorado gold mining town that closed off its vein after 27 miners were trapped and ultimately killed. Flash forward 93 years to the mine being reopened. A young miner, Roger (Jeff Harlan) invites his lady, Jessica (Anne-Marie Martin) and her friend, [...]

Silent Rage is a movie that gets mentioned a lot when someone brings up the concept of the slasher-hybrid. Action and slash have a fairly decent history with each other and movies like Rage and Cobra especially, do much to knit the genres into something all its own. Rage also has science fiction working for [...]

Scarecrows is one of the scariest independent films released during the 1980s. This film should feature a warning label: Do Not Watch Unless You Want the Heebie-Jeebies, Goosebumps, and Cold Chills Slithering Up Your Spine. It’s the type of film that makes you turn on every light in the house when it’s over. Some scary [...]

When Perfect Blue played movie festivals in the late 90′s it created an immediate sensation. The blending of animation with a sophisticated murder mystery caught viewers by surprise. Anime and horror magazines proclaimed director Satoshi Kon a visionary and urged their readers to see this amazing new film. Horror animation wasn’t new in 1998 but [...]

Everything about Cruising is difficult. The plotting is labyrinthine, the tone relentlessly sleazy, and there’s bound to be something about it that offends you, whether it’s the extremes of the subject matter or the social attitudes of the time, which, like everything else in the film, positively perspire off the screen. But is it worth [...]

While a huge part of my heart belongs to slashers, another section is reserved solely for shark attack films. I’m sure it goes back to coming of age during the release of Spielberg’s original classic, which was so successful the term “blockbuster” was coined. Like the first Jaws, the sequel was plagued with problems, but [...]

Not to be confused with quasi-slashers, which are movies with vague slasher elements (in which case, I’m pretty sure every single horror movie and serial killer thriller would be valid), slasher-hybrids are films that specifically combine the slasher film with an outside genre but can exist in both worlds on their own merits. One example [...]