When making a meta-commentary on a genre, is there a line that shouldn’t be crossed? When Wes Craven gave us Scream, with its rule-spouting characters, the self-awareness of genre clichés was somewhat fresh, but now, post-Cabin in the Woods, the subversion of the genre has almost become a cliché in and of itself, and herein…
Author: Mike Brooks
The Christmas Chronicles (2018)
With the holiday season upon us, this means our television viewing will most likely consist of some Christmas classics, but between the multiple showings of It’s a Wonderful Life or the twenty-four-hour marathons of A Christmas Story, we will also be bombarded with a boatload of “fresh” Christmas content, ones that will be vying to…
Deep Rising (1998) – Review
Blending horror and comedy has always been a tricky thing – too often the comedy can undercut the horror – but in 1998, writer/director Stephen Sommers released Deep Rising, which was not only a horror/comedy but an action movie as well. Added to the mix was a monster that would be 95% CGI – at…
Tarantula (1955) – Review
When it wasn’t atomic bombs creating giant monsters in the 1950s, it was your garden variety mad scientist, tinkering away in his beaker-filled lab, spilling behemoth creatures all over the landscape, and one of the most memorable examples of this is the 1955 creature feature Tarantula. Produced and directed by the legendary filmmaker Jack Arnold, Tarantula…
Overlord (2018) – Review
Genre mash-ups can be a lot of fun, and when it’s horror with another genre, the results can be quite surprising – horror-comedy being one of the more prevalent of these – but one horror combo that doesn’t get a lot of love is the horror/war movie mash-up, which is why Overlord is such a…