Slasher movies, we might theorise, are like the pizza of horror. In other words, even when they’re not much good, they’re still kinda good, so long as those same basic ingredients are being used in the right quantities: masked killer, witless sinful victims, creative or at least gory death scenes. Think of those as the […]
Never before released in the UK on any format (at least not legally), by all accounts the only press this sleazy slasher got on release was down to director Ivan Nagy’s role in the Heidi Fleiss scandal. Not long thereafter it sank without a trace, and for the best part of 20 years it was […]
As has oft been noted, one of the great pleasures of attending film festivals, getting early looks at films which have yet to (or in some cases, never really do) reach a wide audience, is being caught by surprise by material of which you knew little or nothing beforehand. This is particularly the case when […]
Everyone and their mums will tell you that the slasher genre came into being in the mid-1970s; building primarily on the legacy of Hitchcock’s Psycho, such down and dirty independent productions like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre laid the groundwork for the innumerable stab-happy B-movies which came in the […]
Nothing sells a slasher like a holiday association. You really don’t need me to do the list; if it’s been deemed a day of rest or celebration which is in some way marked annually, then it’s fertile ground in which to cultivate 80-odd minutes of hapless, sinful youngsters getting hacked up by a maniac. Small […]
For a filmmaker largely forgotten by the wider audience, the late Bob Clark’s directorial career had a surprising impact. With 1981’s Porky’s, he blew the doors wide open on the teen sex comedy boom; and I understand 1983’s A Christmas Story is something of a perennial festive favourite in the US (I myself have never […]
Microbudget slasher movies from unknown filmmakers have always been ten-a-penny, and in the DV age they’re arguably all the more innumerable. Adding a recognised genre star always goes a long way to lifting such a film above the quagmire. Also, it never hurts to set your film on an annual holiday; all being well it […]
Sigh – yet another Friday the 13th comes around, yet for the eighth bloody year in a row we still don’t have another Friday the 13th movie. Okay, I’ll accept that perhaps not all readers will be as bummed about that as I am, but I also know that I’m not alone in missing the […]