Half Past Midnight (1988) and Heaven is Only in Hell (1994)
Editor’s Note: We’re also discussing the writer and director’s earlier works Pandora (1984) and Dance Macabre (1986) within this review. Thanks to the digital realms, with horror fans willing to rip VHS tapes into DVD-rs for their retro-retail portals and video-sharing sites, the once-lost, extremely-hard-to-find resume of Wim Vink — which has all of the […]
Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (2012)
What a path from Japan to my little house in Monongahela, PA, USA: Filmed in 1995. Edited in 2005. Completed in 2009. Released in 2012 on DVD-R. Theatrical release and DVD in Japan 2014. Released internationally in 2017. After a surprise phone call from his photojournalist ex-girlfriend interrupts the most important part of his day — […]
Satan’s Blade (1985)
Yeah, I know Satan’s Blade was shot on 35mm, but this “SOV Week” is all about the brick and mortar nostalgia of the video store ’80s. So, if it walks like an SOV and quacks like an SOV and has a cheesy, Combat-cum-Scrapnel Records-styled cover — film stocks, be damned — it’s an SOV in […]
FANTASTIC FEST: The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021)
The Langoliers may be at the bottom of Stephen King adaptions, but if The Timekeepers of Eternity has any say in things, we’ve been misjudging Tom Holland’s 1995 TV miniseries. Animator Aristotelis Maragkos has printed every frame of that movie and used collage animation to reconstruct, remix and retell the story in an entirely new way, […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Mlungu Wam (2021)
The title of this movie is Xhosa and translates as Good Madam, as the white madam is at the center of this film, a comatose woman being looked after by Mavis, the mother of Tisdi, this movie’s protagonist. As they live in the wealthy suburbs of Cape Town — yet always apart from the city — […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Masking Threshold (2021)
Masking Threshold is one of the stranger films I’ve seen in some time, almost a YouTube video filled with non-stop zoom-in screens and talking from a person we never see, an IT person (physically played by Johannes Grenzfurthner with spoken performance by Ethan Haslam) who has been dealing with non-stop ringing in his ears for […]
FANTASTIC FEST: Hellbender (2021)
Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu made The Deeper You Dig, a movie that divided Becca and me. For their follow-up, the Adams family has created a movie all about 16-year-old Izzy (Zelda), whose mother (Toby Poser) keeps isolated due to a rare illness. Yet as Izzy begins to grow as a woman — beyond playing metal […]
Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames (1986)
You can’t lie to us. There’s no breaking of the Ninth Commandment, allowed. Not this time. We know you’ve never seen or heard of this beautiful collision of a Christploitation flick and an ’80s SOV’er for the most epic, greatest SOV in the horror realms committed to video tape. And yes, video store owners, who […]
Fatal Exposure (1989)
Oh, this friggin’ SOV’er . . . it’s a bizarre gem that wastes no time and is everything that the SOV porn-backed Spine strove to be — and failed. It skips the opening title cards and gives us two 30-year-old virgin teenagers making out for the first time — well, Marybeth gives herself away for […]
Night Feeder (1988)
“Slit your wrists, you f**kin’ b**ch.” — The oh, so snotty and so punk DSZ, who, after the show, got their poseur arses tag-teamed by Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins in the back alley where Johnny Rotton urinates on them while Sid Vicious gives ’em a Doc Martin to the ribs. A brain-eating monster-mutant baby […]
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