|
|
|
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice
|
|
|
Friday the 13th 1
: essential video:This splatter flick, along with John Carpenter's Halloween, helped spawn the great horror-movie movement of the '80s, not to mention eight sequels, many of which had nothing to do with the films that preceded them. It also gave birth to Jason Voorhees, one of the three biggest horror-movie psychos of the modern era (the other two being Halloween's Michael Myers and A Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger). Forever duplicated, the original Friday the 13th popularized a number of themes and techniques that ...
|
|
|
Children of the Corn
: :The murder rate is as high as an elephant's eye in this flaccid adaptation of Stephen King's short story. While driving through Nebraska en route to a new job, medico Burt (Peter Horton) and his wife Vicky (a pre-Terminator Linda Hamilton) nearly run over a mutilated boy who staggers from the cornfields. Seeking help, they enter the town of Gatlin, whose under-20 residents have butchered their parents per the decree of junior-grade holy roller Isaac (John Franklin), who preaches the word of a being called ...
|
|
|
Halloween 4
: :'You can't kill the bogeyman,' the children insist to a terrorized Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the original Halloween. How right they are. Laurie is gone, but guess who's back in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers? Acting as if the third entry never existed, this installment picks up 10 years after the original, with mad maniac Myers in a coma and moved to a new facility. But wouldn't you know it that as soon as a loose-lipped orderly lets slip that Myers ...
|
|
|
Psycho (1960)
: essential video:For all the slasher pictures that have ripped off Psycho (and particularly its classic set piece, the 'shower scene'), nothing has ever matched the impact of the real thing. More than just a first-rate shocker full of thrills and suspense, Psycho is also an engrossing character study in which director Alfred Hitchcock skillfully seduces you into identifying with the main characters--then pulls the rug (or the bathmat) out from under you. Anthony Perkins is unforgettable as Norman Bates, the mama's boy proprietor of ...
|
|
|
Hellraiser 2: Hellbound
: :Definitely not one for the weak of stomach, Hellbound takes up where the first Hellraiser left off, piling on the gore to near camp levels. Luckily, the 1988 sequel retains enough of British horror-meister Clive Barker's macabre wit--like the original, it's based on a Barker story--to save it from the schlock-heap. Hospitalized following her last misadventure, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) implores authorities to destroy a bloody bed at the carnage scene, but the enigmatic Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham) brings an addled patient there and unleashes a ...
|
|
|
Halloween
: essential video:Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed by Carpenter himself, the ...
|
|
|
A Nightmare on Elm Street Collection
: essential video:In the trinity of modern horror films, there's the father (Michael Myers of Halloween), the son (Jason of Friday the 13th fame, a knockoff), and the unholy spirit, Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. The spectral man who haunted the nightmares of unsuspecting teenagers with deadly consequences, Freddy (as played by Robert Englund) was a truly frightening bogeyman and icon for the '80s. Unlike the hockey-masked Jason, who dispatched horny teenagers with mechanical and monotonous ease (he never talked, never ...
|
|
|
Scream 3 (Special Edition)
: :When Randy the video geek rattles off the rules of surviving a horror movie in Wes Craven's Scream, he speaks for a generation of filmgoers who are all too aware of slasher movie clichés. Playfully scripted by Kevin Williamson with a self-aware wink and more than a few nods to its grandfathers (from Psycho to Halloween to the Friday the 13th dynasty), Scream skewers teen horror conventions with loving reverence while re-creating them in a modern, movie-savvy context. And so goes the series, which continues ...
|
|
|
Halloween 2
: :'You can't kill the boogeyman,' explains John Carpenter in Halloween, and to prove it he brings Michael Myers back in this handsome but grisly sequel. Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode but spends most of her time cowering in a hospital gown, and Donald Pleasence runs around like a maniac as the panicky doctor desperate to hunt down Myers before he kills again. Carpenter writes and produces with partner Debra Hill, and together they replace the mystery and uncertainty of the original with an ...
|
|