The Walking Dead Season 8 Comic-Con Trailer Analysis...

It's that time of year again – San Diego Comic-Con – and, naturally, that means the trailer for the new season of The Walking Dead!

Now, as I've written about before, Season 7 undoubtedly had some problems – however, the show makers have proved in the past that they do listen to fans' concerns and make changes. I've read a few interviews with Scott Gimple (the show runner) where he has stated that not only will the pace of the 8^th Season be ramped up, but the structure of the storytelling will be changed. In other words, aside from the possibility of a flashback episode detailing Negan's back story, the 'isolated episodes showing just one character/story' are out. These stand alone episodes can work in moderation: The Governor's flashback episodes in Season 4, for example, or the episode in which we saw how Morgan came to regain his sanity and find a path to peace, or indeed, 7x02 in which we follow Carol and Morgan as we were introduced to The Kingdom (with a satisfying conclusion at the end, justifying Ezekiel's more outré characteristics).

Season 7's biggest problem was definitely the structure, which made the overall story feel fractured with main characters disappearing for a handful of episodes at a time while the writers played for time in-between the premières and finales, sapping considerable momentum. The low point for all this? Episode 7x06: the Oceanside episode – Tara couldn't carry the weight of introducing the third new community of people inside five episodes after The Kingdom and The Sanctuary. Indeed, the introduction of those scumbag trash pile people (lead by the irritating Jadis) proved problematic for the back-half of the seventh season, too.

Anyway – enough of that, because Season 8 is shaping up to be an exciting thrill ride that will reward viewers' patience. All Out War has been declared and the battles are upon us!

Click “READ MORE” below to see what's what in the Season 8 trailer...

The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (Emilio P Miraglia, 1971) Blu-Ray Review

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“It's not uncommon for a man to do strange things to get his kicks.” The opening companion piece to Miraglia's 1972 gothic-tinged giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave treads similar ground to its successor. Miraglia juxtaposes the old and new worlds whereby the cutting edge design of the 1970s sits amidst a crumbling ancestral home built from stone and sordid family secrets. Riddled with nihilism, this forever-twisting tale of a sadomasochistic fetishist and his not-quite-so-dead wife is soaked-through with moral decay...

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The Bogey Man (Ulli Lommel, 1980) DVD Review

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“The Most Terrifying Nightmare of Childhood is About to Return!” Combining dark themes of childhood trauma with slasher movie tropes, The Bogey Man (or Boogey Man, if you prefer) – a former 'Video Nasty' in the UK – tries to do something original with the genre at a time when the formula was being set that others would blindly follow...

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Ash vs Evil Dead – Comic-Con Trailer Analysis

Watch the Official Trailer HERE and the Comic-Con Panel HERE.

Ash is back, baby! The trailer for the ten-part horror/comedy series from Starz premiered at Comic-Con 2015 and it's whipped up a bit of a fan frenzy – so let's dig into some of the highlights.

Boy Done Good:

So where's Ash gone since we last saw him? Not very far, it seems – if anything he's gone in reverse – living in a trailer hitched to the same car he's always had (just think of the time and money Ash must have spent restoring it after the events of the third film!), and now he's not even working at S-Mart. Now he has – so I presume – slid down the retail ladder to 'Value Stop' where he's still a Stockboy, re-living past glories as he tells his co-worker Pablo of his prior adventures: “I was the only one to escape, but now the evil has found me.” At least he's got himself a new prosthetic hand – a bit more fitting to 21^st Century life than that bulky steel contraption from the last movie … maybe whatever magic that made it function wore off? “You won't see that hand, but that's all I'll say,” teased Raimi in response to a fan question on the matter of Ash's substitute hand at the Comic-Con Panel.

“Ash, even in his prime, would be the wrong guy to save the world – now he's thirty years older and he has to save the world! I'm really worried for the world,” said Campbell of Ash's advancing years. “Crabby old man Ash.” Sam Raimi also noted some of Ash's continued (but loveable) foibles: that the character is “a heel, a coward, and a blow hard” but is also “a great monster hunter”. Still though, while he may be a bit down-at-heel (he's even revealed to be wearing dentures at one point – but could this just be a little joke only for the trailer?), Ash still knows how to wield a stump-mounted chainsaw – a moment in the trailer that pushed all the right buttons!

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Barbed Wire Dolls (Jess Franco, 1975) DVD Review

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“I'm the Warden of this prison, you're lucky to have been put in my care.” Teaming up with the 'European Roger Corman' Erwin C. Dietrich, on what would be the first of fifteen pairings, Jess Franco was up to his typically mucky-minded antics with the inventively titled Barbed Wire Dolls. Classed by the Catholic Church as a “most dangerous film maker”, Franco's fast and loose style pre-dated the infamous and short-lived Dogme '95 movement – a venture that the mammary-mad auteur dismissed as “a very good publicity thing for a moment”. The use of natural light, a hand-held and self-operated camera, and other things may have been cheap, but it also added a twisted sense of reality to his films, and Barbed Wire Dolls is certainly one of Franco's more warped efforts...

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Venus In Furs (Massimo Dallamano, 1969) DVD Review

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“A pleasure that is so great it can be painful.” Massimo Dallamano's Venus In Furs (aka Devil in the Flesh), not to be confused with Jess Franco's Venus In Furs (also 1969, aka Paroxismus), is based on the 1870 novella of the same name by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. It was released in the dying days of the swinging sixties – in Denmark and West Germany, at least – but it wasn't distributed in Dallamano's native Italy until 1973, at which point it was quickly confiscated and cut to ribbons, such was the perceived danger of it's carnal sights. The age of the Internet may have dulled some of the film's softer titillations, but even 45 years later its darker passages of voyeurism, submission, and sadomasochism can still inspire shock, even repulsion.

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Satan's Baby Doll (Mario Bianchi, 1982) DVD Review

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“Tender young flesh seduced by the ultimate evil.” / “When the Devil calls, she comes...” Mario Bianchi, here credited as Alan W. Cools, directed this lurid film Satan's Baby Doll, sometimes known in America as 'A Girl For Satan', mixing pornographic pleasure with possession and pain. Within the confines of the Aguilar castle, a lushly decorated tomb resting high upon an emerald hill (the same exterior in Antonio Margheriti's Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye), the forces of evil are about to sink their teeth into some delicious revenge.

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Hard To Die AKA Sorority House Massacre 3 (Jim Wynorski 1990) Review

Find more film reviews here. Read the review for “Sorority House Massacre 2” here.

“They may have killed his body, but he swore his spirit would never die.” Produced in the same year directly after Sorority House Massacre 2, with much of the same cast and crew involved, Hard To Die: Sorority House Massacre 3 (minus the sorority house aspect) – otherwise known as Tower of Terror – is kind of like Die Hard, but with beautiful women in lingerie.

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Sorority House Massacre 2 (Jim Wynorski 1990) Review

Find more film reviews here, or read the review for “Hard To Die: Sorority House Massacre 3” here.

“It's Cleavage vs Cleavers and the result is Delta Delta Deadly!” In 1986 Carol Frank wrote and directed Sorority House Massacre, a thinly-veiled rip-off of John Carpenter's Halloween (much like many of the slasher films of the decade), and while several franchises were pumping out annual sequels, it wasn't until 1990 that SHM would become a series. Moving away from copycat stalk-and-slash hijinks, SHM2, subtitled 'Nighty Nightmare', was a saucy direct-to-video dose self awareness that favoured knowing winks to the audience as often as it lingered on the nubile young bodies of the gorgeous cast … in other words, exactly the kind of VHS rental any teenage boy in the 1990s would have sought out with wide-eyes.

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The Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1971) Review

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“With needles dipped in deadly venom the victims are paralysed – so they must lie awake and watch themselves die!” During the 1970s, Italian silver screens were crammed full with giallo films; lurid murder mysteries that combined achingly beautiful visuals with sharp shocks and jagged social commentary, and it was in The Black Belly of the Tarantula that perhaps the most original Modus Operandi in the history of gialli was exhibited.

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He Knows You're Alone (Armand Mastroianni, 1980) Review

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In 1978 John Carpenter's Halloween (following the likes of Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Black Christmas) popularised the slasher movie format to such an extent that a torrent of imitators would soon follow. Some became enduring genre classics like Friday the 13^th, while others were rushed knock-offs … He Knows You're Alone is, unfortunately, one of the latter. However, some of its cast members went on to become very well known – one of whom even became an A-List Oscar winner.

Click “READ MORE” below for the full review, many more screenshots, and to find out who the Oscar Winning cast member is...

2019 After the Fall of New York (Sergio Martino 1983) Review

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“Since the nuclear holocaust, twenty years have passed.” Many of the Italian film-makers who became best known for a particular genre – be it giallo, cannibals, zombies, etc – were experienced in a range of genres. During the 1970s and 1980s the Italian film industry was booming as socio-political upheaval provided impetus for change and ideas for screenplays, and productions sought to become ever more ambitious. In 1983, Sergio Martino (The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, Torso) unleashed an audacious – if derivative – sci-fi action extravaganza that stretched its modest budget far and wide with obliterated cityscapes, vehicular combat, and even a space shuttle.

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Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (Umberto Lenzi, 1972) Review

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“Let's make a hypothesis – two dead girls and a single killer.” Umberto Lenzi (Eyeball, Oasis of Fear) traditionally kicks off his films with a quick-firing few minutes to get the audience's pulse racing, and Seven Blood-Stained Orchids is no different. A black-gloved killer driving through the night accompanied by composer Riz Ortolani's laid-back grooves, the ever-present flick knife gleaming in the moon light, a home invasion, and then the savage bludgeoning of a prostitute – Lenzi isn't one for hanging around during his opening act.

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Silent Night (Steven C. Miller, 2012) DVD Review

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Based on the 1984 slasher film Silent Night Deadly Night, which inspired controversy and parental panic across the United States upon its release, this 2012 remake takes the basic premise – a vengeful killer in a Santa suit slaughtering their way through a small town – and runs with it in a sufficiently different and more detailed direction.

 

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Seven Deaths In The Cat's Eye (Antonio Margheriti, 1973) DVD Review

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With gialli, you'd usually find a straight-razor-wielding maniac running amok in and around the beautiful architecture of an Italian city (often-times Rome), but Antonio (Cannibal Apocalypse) Margheriti's Seven Deaths In The Cat's Eye (aka Cat's Murdering Eye) stands out from the crowd with a Scottish setting in a coldly gothic castle. It's as if the frenzied slew of 1970s giallo crashed head-first with a mist-wreathed Hammer Horror Film.

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The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (Luciano Ercoli, 1970) DVD Review

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Typically, giallo films centre around a crazed killer dispatching beautiful women, or anyone who blocks their path for vengeance, but there are occasions where the genre strays further afield, and the lines of definition begin to blur. Step forth Luciano Ercoli's elaborately-named The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, a mysterious psycho-sexual tale of bourgeois blackmail.

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Watch Me When I Kill (Antonio Bido, 1977) DVD Review

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Otherwise known as “The Cat's Victims” or “The Cat With The Jade Eyes”, Watch Me When I Kill was Antonio Bido's first foray into the world of giallo filmmaking. Coming from a background in art house film, Bido wanted a commercial hit that would appeal in equal measure to film buffs and general audiences. Taking inspiration from the likes of Hitchcock and Argento, and combining the original, artier script with more mainstream adaptations, Watch Me When I Kill came into being.

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The Las Vegas Serial Killer (Wolfgang Schmidt, 1987) Review

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Just like with The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher, Ray Dennis Steckler is under the guises of Wolfgang Schmidt and Sven Christian as Director, Cinematographer and Editor of this sketchy 1987 follow-up, which continues in much the same vein as its predecessor.

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The Hollywood Strangler Meets The Skid Row Slasher (Wolfgang Schmidt, 1979) Review

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Wolfgang Schmidt is actually a pseudonym for Ray Dennis Steckler, who is best known for his 1963 movie “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies”. Steckler had numerous aliases which included Sven Christian – credited here in a dual-role of Cinematographer and Editor – and was well known for working on an extremely low budget (sometimes just a few thousand dollars).

If you're into ultra low budget, down-and-dirty slasher flicks, then you've come to the right place.

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The ABCs of Death (2013) Review...

Anthology horror films are experiencing a regained sense of rude health of late, particularly with high profile flicks like V/H/S and it's sequel, but The ABCs of Death manages to strike new ground within the anthology horror sub-genre – put simply: 26 Directors, 26 Ways to Die. 

However, the trouble with anthology films is that not all parts are equal, with some failing to measure up at all – so what will it be for this inventive onslaught of horror? Hits, misses, and the iffy in-betweens all coming up for all 26 shorts.

Click “READ MORE” below to learn your ABCs...