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Scream 2
: :Fully aware of its status as the sequel to the surprise hit thriller of 1996, this lively follow-up trades freshness for familiarity, playing on our affection for returning characters while obeying--and then subverting--the 'rules' of sequels. Once again, movie references are cleverly employed to draw us into the story, which takes place two years after the events of Scream, at a small Ohio college, where the Scream survivors reunite when another series of mysterious killings begins. Capitalizing on the ...
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Parents
: :In Parents, director Bob Balaban deconstructs our Father Knows Best perception of '50s suburbia, skewing it via moody cinematography and Angelo Badalamenti's sinister score. Ten-year-old Michael Lamele (Bryan Madorsky) thinks his parents (Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt) are cannibals. His constant fear of his folks and their supposedly evil doings begin to warp his view of the world, and he starts seeing a social worker to confront his problems. Are they merely childhood fears intensified by an overactive ...
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Fearless Vampire Killers
: essential video:One of Roman Polanski's more overt comedies, this 1966 monster spectacle stars Jack MacGowran and Polanski as a clunky but heroic pair of vampire killers. Called upon to rescue the beautiful and buxom daughter (Sharon Tate) of an innkeeper from a Draculalike bloodsucker, the duo muddle through all sorts of scrapes, the most intense being a scene in which a room full of dancing vampires realize the human interlopers are the only ones in the room who ...
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Scream
: essential video:With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out. Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and (like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial killer starts hacking ...
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Saturday the 14th
: essential video:With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out. Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and (like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial killer starts hacking ...
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Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)
: essential video:With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out. Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and (like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial killer starts hacking ...
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Terrorvision
: essential video:With the smash hit Scream, novice screenwriter Kevin Williamson and veteran horror director Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street) revived the moldering corpse of the teen horror picture, both creatively and commercially, by playfully acknowledging the exhausted clichés and then turning them inside out. Scream is a postmodern slasher movie, a horror film that cleverly deconstructs horror films, then reassembles the dead tissue, and (like Frankenstein's monster) creates new life. When a serial killer starts hacking ...
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Killer Klowns from Outer Space
: essential video:What's completely and utterly baffling about Killer Klowns is not the plot--that's rather tidily summed up by the title--but the fact that it got made at all. According to the filmmakers, (the Chiodo brothers: Charles, Edward, and Stephen) all it took to convince the studio was a one-page treatment and a picture of a clown holding a gun. It boggles the mind. Anyway, some killer Klowns descend from outer space and start wrapping their hapless victims in ...
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Mad Monster Party
: :Love the classic monsters Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dr. Jekyll, the Creature, Dracula, the Werewolf, and the Invisible Man? They're all here in this animated, 90-minute video--and so are the vocal talents of Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller. After discovering the secret of destruction, Baron von Frankenstein is retiring as head of the World Wide Organization of Monsters. He's handpicked his mortal nephew Felix to be his successor, and his fellow monsters are less than pleased. Even though Felix politely ...
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Evil Dead 2
: :Writer-director Sam Raimi's extremely stylized, blood-soaked follow-up to his creepy Evil Dead isn't really a sequel; rather, it's a remake on a better budget. It also isn't really a horror film (though there are plenty of decapitations, zombies, supernatural demons, and gore) as much as it is a hilarious, sophisticated slapstick send-up of the terror genre. Raimi takes every horror convention that exists and exaggerates it with mind-blowing special effects, crossed with mocking Three Stooges humor. The plot alone ...
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