Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: Three schoolgirls and their teacher mysteriously disappear on Valentine’s Day in 1900. REVIEW: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is one of the most famous Australian movies ever made. Based on a novel of the same title by Lady Joan Lindsay, this is the film that launched the career of director Peter Weir (The Truman Show-1998; The …

The late John Carradine (1906-1988) was one of the most prolific character actors of the 20th Century. He has 352 acting credits listed in the Internet Movie Database, but once claimed that he actually appeared in more than 400 television and film productions. As a member of director John Houston’s stable of stock players and also as a free-lancer, he …

Horror fans have an on-and-off relationship with anthology shows. Historically, the television (and now, streaming) landscape is littered with the corpses of great but short-lived shows. Some of these Ghosts of Anthologies Past deserve to be given a second look, and for many, YouTube or DailyMotion are the only way for average viewers to check them out. Here’s a guide …

Rate This Movie SYNOPSIS: A troubled young woman buys a doll from a sinister street vendor and discovers that the doll has the supernatural power to solve all of her problems—or so she thinks. REVIEW: The Doll (2015).  Directed by B. Tsogt-Erdene; starring N. Munkhsoyol, M. Sarantsetseg, and U. Munguntulga; distributed by Midnight Pulp. Talk about obscure! This movie doesn’t …

In no other film genre is the musical score as important as it is in a horror or suspense drama. The score sets the mood (usually dark, creepy or mysterious), leads the audience down blind alleys, and then springs the jump scare on the hapless viewers when they least expect it. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, anyway. Some …

It’s been called “the world’s most-filmed ghost story.” Yes, it’s The Turn of the Screw, an 1890s ghost story written by Henry James. Movie makers and TV producers just can’t seem to stop themselves from filming it, apparently. The long list of English-language productions in the IMDb ranges from a 1959 live telecast featuring multiple Oscar-winner Ingrid Bergman (unfortunately not …

Halloween is creeping up on us and everybody’s got their favorite spooky playlist, including me. However, some readers may be interested to know, what really inspired the following 13 songs about werewolves, monsters, witches, Faustian deals, and the like? Some of the answers are surprising. Who would have thought that Zelda Fitzgerald (wife of The Great Gatsby author F. Scott) …

Let’s face it, if I really wanted to do justice to a list of the ten best films featuring the late Sir Christopher Lee, I would have had to watch three movies per day for almost three months. (The man has 280 credits to his name in his IMDb filmology. This doesn’t include the music videos he made with various …

10.) Grace (2009) directed by Paul Solet (Bullet Head, 2017); starring Jordan Ladd, Samantha Ferris, Gabrielle Rose and Stephen Park. A pregnant woman named Madeline (Jordan Ladd, Robot Chicken series) loses her husband and near-term baby in a car accident in this bizarre indie flick from the late 2000’s. She decides to wait for natural labor to deliver the dead …

Sometime, in the late 1960s, the horror genre changed; it became mainstream, with big-name stars and bigger budgets. It was no longer more or less the main province of genre fans and stars like Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, or Lon Chaney, Jr., or established genre directors like Terence Fisher or Freddie Francis. In this post from my personal blog, I …

Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed by George Romero; starring Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea as two strangers who join forces to survive the original Zombie Apocalypse. One of the most influential horror movies ever made, Night of the Living Dead was initially dismissed by many critics as a cheap “exploitation” film (Rex Reed was a notable exception). In …

I have to be in a certain mood to watch Asian horror. I must confess that I mostly haven’t been in that mood for quite a few years. In the previous decade, I was quite taken with Asian horror (along with everybody else) and I watched all the classics, as well as the American remakes: The Ring, The Grudge, The …

There’s lots to choose from in this category, and I know some Harry Potter fans may get a little ruffled by the absences of Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith) or Hermione Granger (Emma Watson.). To be memorable, in my estimation, a movie witch must be at least a little scary, even if she’s starring in a romantic comedy like Rene Clair’s …

While researching this list, I came to the wholly unscientific conclusion that the most dangerous movie sets for performers and crew members are those for sword-and-sandals movies, followed by aviation flicks. Strangely, not a lot of search hits came up for accidents and deaths associated with horror movies, unless the comic VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN (see below) qualifies. This is by …

As a young actor just starting out—years before STAR TREK (TOS)—William Shatner seemed to have a taste for roles that veered into the otherworldly or the macabre. His early filmography includes one episode of ONE STEP BEYOND, two episodes of the original TWILIGHT ZONE, one episode of the original OUTER LIMITS, and two episodes of Boris Karloff’s early 60s anthology …