Pop Culture Petri Dish

Some crappy made-for-cable horror movies are born with crappiness, some achieve their crappiness, and some have their crappiness thrust upon them. Despite the fact that it premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel (or as it's now known, SyFy --please explain, someone) in 2007, I'd argue that Sands of Oblivion was not born crappy. It's got the kernel of an interesting idea, some likeable actors, and a monster--three fine starting points for a night of Horrorpalooza entertainment. Sands of Oblivion's neural crappiness pathway runs twofold. On one hand the script works hard to achieve a pretty consistent level of crappy; on the other mitt, this little thriller's sphincter-cinchingly low budget thrusts the crappy onto it as well. As anyone who's visited these hallowed electronic halls knows, however, crappy in the convergent conventional sense often portends at least a few yocks with your schlock. I'm a sucker for speculative fiction that uses real-life events as...

What was the first project director Sam Raimi undertook after he finished the third mammoth Spider Man movie? Well, if yours truly's scribbling about it in October, you can bet it wasn't a quaint comedy of manners set in rural Edwardian England. No, Raimi's labor of love--the movie he chose to make for pure fun after the rigors of an umpeen-hundred-million dollar superhero flick--was a horror film. And thank God for it. Drag Me to Hell hit theaters last spring, and today it arrived in all its pus-projecting, roof-rattling glory on DVD and Blu-Ray. Those of little faith who'd assumed the mastermind behind the Evil Dead movies (which, incidentally, are playing locally at a revival theater near me--plug, plug ) had forgotten his roots need look no further for rebuttal than this most joyous of spook shows. Alison Lohman plays Christine, a loan officer struggling to hold her own against her co-workers at a cutthroat local bank...

As an afterthought/tie-in to their coverage of HBO's True Blood series, Entertainment Weekly published its  list of the 20 Greatest Vampires of All Time in late July. The list skewed towards the requisite flavors-of-the-month ( True Blood ,  Twilight 's Edward Cullen, etc.), with a few detours into the inspired (Goth goddess Barbara Steele's vampiress Asa in Black Sunday !) and at least one WTF ranking (that'd be putting Bela Lugosi's immortal Count Dracula at number three--hel-LO??). But one of the most disheartening omissions was that of Jerry Dandridge, the principal bloodsucker in 1985's Fright Night . On the face of it, I reckon I understand. Fright Night 's almost 25 years old, and hasn't yet acquired the revisionist cache of Kathleen Bigelow's once-underrated-but-now-cultishly-adored Near Dark (whose Caleb and Mae did make the EW list). Too bad, because Chris Sarandon's portrayal of Dandridge is a stone-classic. Fright Night d...

At first, Mystics in Bali  tastes just like any other tacky tropical cocktail you'd get in a plastic coconut-shaped cup at any crappy little dive bar. You know the kind of poison to which I refer. It's tinted an ungodly neon color from some cheap fruit-flavored drink mixer. A maraschino cherry and a pineapple chunk marinate in the fluid unceremoniously, impaled by the obligatory plastic spear. And the whole odd-tasting concoction's adorned with an obnoxious paper umbrella. So imagine quaffing one of these, only to realize someone's spiked it with the most mind-jiggeringly disorienting exotic hallucinogen a human can ingest; and that there ain't no turnin' back from the wild and hairy trip. That's Mystics in Bali , in a (coco)nutshell. American anthropologist Cathy (Ilona Agathe Bastian) travels to Indonesia, where she watches traditional dances and becomes romantica...

When a horror director strives to craft a chiller that's a bit classier and more thought-provoking than your typical fright flick (as Scott Derrickson does with The Exorcism of Emily Rose ), you can't help but root for him. And when he stumbles on an interesting genre weld that hasn't really been explored to its fullest extent before, you want to like the end result...No, you want to LOVE it. So it stings a little that The Exorcism of Emily Rose doesn't quite cut the mustard; this despite a top-drawer cast, a carefully-crafted visual sense, and an admirable willingness to objectively explore its interesting moral Gordian Knot. Tom Wilkinson plays Father Richard Moore, a Catholic priest accused of negligent homicide when college student Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) dies under his care. Moore, it seems, is convinced that Emily was possessed by the Devil, and his attempt to exorcise the demonic forces from her may have contributed to her death. His powerfu...

The Crotchety Contrarian in me usually avoids movies that generate a lot of hubbub and brouhaha until said hubbub dies down. So when Hostel burst into theaters in early 2006 replete with a thumbs-up from Quentin Tarantino and enough controversy to give thirteen states full of bluenoses massive coronaries, I stayed away for awhile. Time passed. The movie made a mint. Its champions trumpeted it as a horror masterpiece, and its detractors channelled their inner knock-kneed-old-ladies and clucked on about the movie's amorality and violence. In  the three years between its original theatrical release and my viewing of it on late-night cable, the so-called 'Torture Horror' sub-genre it helped birth came into and out of vogue, as fads often do. Some great movies ( The Devil's Rejects ) and some lousy ones (almost all of the rest) surfaced from the trend. So what does this boundary-breaking, notorious socio-cultural zeitgeist of a movie look like today with hindsig...

After several decades of entertaining and influential work behind the camera, director/producer/exploitation legend Roger Corman will finally get some respect in the form of an Honorary Oscar next year . It's a long-overdue acknowledgement considering the man's indelible impact on film.   Corman produced and directed low-budget B-flicks for decades, following trends and social mores with a canny eye for what audiences wanted. but he's probably best known today as mentor to some of the greatest and most successful filmmakers of all time. The roster of talent that Corman mentored during his years as a director and producer pretty much built modern cinema--Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro got some of their earliest acting gigs in Corman's employ, and the rogues' gallery of directorial talent shepherded by this exploitation king includes Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, John Sayles, ...