After Norm McDonald died, Dave Chappelle revealed that he did everything he could to get out of this movie, as it followed the death of his father. Chappelle said that Macdonald was the only person who could make him laugh at the time, which makes him one of the most important people with whom he’s ever worked with.

But here’s the thing. The police shields — which made me nervous just seeing that old logo and uniforms — are real. WPGH is today’s Fox 53. That’s really the Post-Gazette. But this was filmed in Vancouver instead of Pittsburgh, other than probably a few pickups, right? No?

I guess at least it’s set here?

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewsk directed and wrote this and went on to much better things, including Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, Auto Focus and Dolemite Is My Name.  But yeah, it’s silly and actually pretty dumb, but seeing Norm whip around Muffin the dog as it draws blood on his finger while Chapelle screams made me laugh. I’m pretty simple minded

It’s also got Sherman Hemsley, Danny DeVito (who said he did this for the money) and Sarah Silverman in it. But come on. Make Pittsburgh movies here. Come on.

Shot at Washington & Jefferson College and in Edgewood, right across the bridge from Tateh Cuda’s garden, The Dark Half found George Romero again working with a big studio and adapting a Stephen King book.

It has Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) trying to escape the lowbrow horror books he writes under the name Goerge Stark for the highbrow world of literature, even burying Stark in a fake grave. The problem is, well, Stark is real, the soul left behind by a vestigal twin — the brain surgery scene in the beginning is astounding — making his way to Castle Rock to destroy all of the goodness in Thad’s life.

King knows all about this, as his Richard Bachman pen name came from writer Donald E. Westlake, who wrote his more violent fiction as Richard Stark.

Sherriff Alan Pangborn, played by Michael Rooker in this movie, is the same character Ed Harris played in Needful Things. As you can imagine, he has a hard time trying to understand the fact that Thad has a dark version of himself because he’s a man who believes in facts.

I wonder if the extended time Romero spent with Dario Argento led to him portraying Stark as a bandage covered, black hat and cloak wearing giallo killer, complete with a razor blade. He’s always surrounded by swams of loud birds, which is a great tension builder.

Beyond Hutton and Rooker, Romero has a great cast here, including Amy Madigan as Thad’s wife, Julie Harris as a friend who knows Thad’s secret, Chelsea Field as Alan’s wife, plus Royal Dano and Rutanya Alda.

While I like Romero’s smaller productions, I really ended up liking this way more than i thought I would and plan on going back in to watch it again.

Ah, Pennsylvania’s once amazing filming tax credits, which brought a remake of a Canadian slasher to the City of Bridges — well, Kittanning, Bethel, Tarentum, Oakmont, Oakdale and the North Hills — and was smart enough to hire two of our local favorites, stage actor Bingo O’Malley and Tom Atkins, who I don’t need to talk up but I will every chance I get.

Shot in 4K on digital cameras and made for 3D, this movie may have high tech origins but it has low tech old school slasher aims. Directed by Patrick Lussier (Drive Angry, Trick) and written by Todd Farmer (Jason X) and Zane Smith, it follows the original movie and begins on Valentine’s Day, a horrific day for the town of Harmony.

I just want to say — Farmer wrote the scene where the trucker has sex with Irene (Betsy Rue) and she runs through the parking lot naked. He also got himself cast in the part as that trucker. As a writer, I just want to tell you that there can be power in words.

An explosion at the mine leaves only Harry Warden still alive, but he had to murder the others to conserve oxygen. The son of the mine’s owner, Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles) forgot to vent the methane lines that caused the collapse and takes the blame. A year later, Warden awakes from a coma and starts killing all over again, starting with the patients and staff at the hospital, always leaving their hearts in boxes of chocolate.

While all this is happening, Tom, his girlfriend Sarah (Jaime King), Axel (Kerr Smith) and Irene are partying in the mine, which is a bad idea at any time and even worse when you think about all the people who died there and Warden being out and killing. He appears in miner gear and attacks them before Sheriff Burke (Atkins) shoots him. Warden goes deeper into the mind as Tom is shellshocked by what he’s gone through. He leaves town for a decade.

When he comes back to sell the mine, he finds that Axel is the sheriff and now married to Sarah. Things go bad as soon as Tom gets there, as the Miner appears — is it Warden? — and kills Irene and starts building its body count. Ben Foley (Kevin Tighe) and Burke know that it couldn’t be. After all, they killed and buried him, except that now the grave is empty.

Is the killer Axel? Or is it Tom, who has spent seven years in a psychiatric ward? Well, getting there means seeing body parts spray all over the screen in increasingly grisly kills. There’s even a tease of a sequel, which one imagines would have been made in Eastern Europe. Whatever — I ended up enjoying this way more than I thought I would. It probably helps that it was made here, right?

Lindsay Lohan was once on top of the world, but over the last few years, her career has struggled. From Georgia Rule all the way back in 2006 up until The Canyons, Liz & Dick and I Know Who Killed Me, she’s been more involved in the tabloids than starring in films. On the advice of Oprah, she got back to work and made the reality show Lindsay, did stage work in London, was a judge on the Australian Masked Singer and started opening beach clubs in Greece where she did another reality show, Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club. Now, Netflix has given her a multi-movie deal and it’s already paid off, as Falling for Christmas has had great ratings for the streaming platform and the next film she plans on doing is another romantic comedy, Irish Wish.

I may have said it before, but my dream for Lohan is to follow the career of Carroll Baker and head to Italy to make giallo movies with Umberto Lenzi, but sadly this is no longer an option. And if you read my review of I Know Who Killed Me, you already know that she’s done well in a psychosexual murder mystery.

That means that Falling for Christmas is a let-down for me, but I get it. It’s a more successful career path making tried and true romantic holiday movies than it is having a masked killer haunting you through Rome, catching light across your eyes with the glint of a razor blade.

But hey — Lohan does well as spoiled heiress Sierra Belmont — daughter of ski resort owner Beauregard (Jack Wagner from the soaps and the singer of “All I Need”) — and when she’s in a skiing accident and loses her memory, she goes Overboard on ice with nice guy Jake Russell (Chord Overstreet from Glee).

Speaking of singing soap opera stars, this was produced by Michael Damian.

The debut movie from director Janeen Damian, thsi was written by Jeff Bonnett and Ron Oliver, wjho wrote Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou and wrote and directed Prom Night III: Last Kiss. That’s probably the one surprise of this movie which delivers exactly what you want it to, including Lohan recreating the time she sang “JIngle Bell Rock” in Mean Girls and, much like Just My Luck, overflowing a washing machine and falling in love with a guy named Jake.

I don’t begrudge Lohan getting to get a comeback. Here’s hoping that one of these Netflix movies is a remake of So Sweet, So Dead.

Silence of the Lambs is a movie that more intelligent writers than me have discussed, so let me speak on where it was made instead.

Yes, that really in Quantico, Virginia and Clay County, West Virginia, but a lot of this movie was made throughout Pittsburgh, including scenes at the Old Allegheny County Jail (our jail looks like a castle), Hannibal Lecter’s (Anthony Hopkins) impromptu cage being inside the Soldiers and Sailors Museum and Memorial (you can go there every year before Halloween and watch the movie) as well as locations in Canonsburg, the Bradford Court apartments in Crafton, the Grieg Funeral Home in Rural Valley, a house in Glenwillard, Moxley’s Drugs being located in Homestead and Buffalo Bill’s (Ted Levine) house in Perryopolis, which is now a bed and breakfast where you can stay in.

Here’s what’s wild. Levine is from Bellaire, Ohio and he was amazed to discover that the house being considered for his home in the movie was not only in the town where he grew up, but next door to the house of his high school girlfriend.

Based on the book by Thomas Harris and adapted for the screen by Ted Tally, this movie was such a big deal all over the place when it opened in 1991 but man, it has become even a bigger deal here. It even has a cameo for George Romero as a janitor, that’s how much it embraced being made in Pittsburgh.

If you ask me — and you just might — I love Manhunter more than this, but I can admit that everything about this movie is quite good, including the acting from Hopkins, Levine and Jodie Foster. You know who doesn’t agree with that? John Carpenter, who said that the movie focused too much on Clarice and that he could have made it “much more frightening and gripping.”

At first, this was going to be a direct-to-video release as studio executives felt that the film’s subject matter was too gross for a mass audience. Then there was the idea that it win some awards — more on that in a second — and Orion Pictures banned Fangoria from covering the making of the movie.

In closing, allow me to give you some trivia-contest winning info: Silence of the Lambs is one of three films to win all five major Academy Awards, which are Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay. The other two are It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

This movie was part of a three-film deal with United Film Distribution Company along with Knightriders and Creepshow. Director and writer George Romero had final cut but the screenplay was rewritten several times as the idea of making the Gone With the Wind — I’ve also heard Raiders of the Lost Ark referenced — would never get an R rating and be commerical enough for the budget needed to make the movie. Instead, Romero made a smaller movie on his terms.

While some scenes were shot in Florida, the majority of the footage was shot deep below the normal world in Wampum, PA, just ten miles or less from my parent’s house. As a middle school student, I noticed a lot of seniors were skipping class. They were all going to the salt mines, where this was filming, and would come back with arms made up by Tom Savini. Seeing as how my entire family taught at school — my dad was an art teacher, mom English, uncle the librarian and my aunt was the guidance counselor — all I could do was dream of skipping out and getting to be in a George Romero movie.

If the world seemed like it was ending in Dawn of the Dead, Day finds it definitely over. Few survivors exist — if you follow the math in the film, around six hundred humans are still alive — as Dr. Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille, daughter of Pittsburgh horror host “Chilly” Billy Cardille and an absolute force in this film), her rapidly growing suicical lover Private Miguel Salazar (Anthony Dileo Jr.), radio operator Bill McDermott (Jarlath Conroy) and helicopter pilot Flyboy (Terry Alexander) have just gone through another town where all they find are the living dead and crocodiles as newspapers blow past the camera proclaiming that the dead walk. It’s an amazing scene and sets you up for so much, but I’m going to have to come clean and lose a few of you here.

I’ve never liked this movie as much as I feel I should.

I don’t know if it’s the calustrophobic conditions, the fact that there’s no hope or that it could never live up to the pedestal I put Dawn of the Dead on, but I always wanted more.

That said — there is much that I do love.

Dr. Matthew “Frankenstein” Logan (Richard Liberty) and his relationship with the only zombie who can communicate, Bub (Sherman Howard) is the emotional heart of this film and the idea that the undead can be reasoned with is the lone hopeful moment. It’s also a major issue that Logan is using dead soldiers to experiment on, as the goal was to find a cure and there’s already a rough relationship between science and military after the death of commanding officer Major Cooper. Now, with Captain Henry Rhodes (Jospeh Pilato) in charge, if they find out that the beloved Cooper is one of the test subjects, the scientists, or lambs, will lose the protection of the soldiers, or the shepherds, from the zombies. You know, the wolves.

I guess I’m downplaying the hope, as there is a helicopter escape at the end, even if that feels cribbed from the last film. There’s also the amazing moment where Rhodes is literally torn apart by the zombies after Bub shoots him for killing his creator. For all the critical words tosses at Pilato for overacting, he’s great in this scene.

Actually, there’s one other moment of hope I never picked up on until now: when Dr. Logan and Fisher are shot, they don’t come back from the dead. Perhaps whatever caused the zombie outbreak has ended.

As for the song that plays over the credits, “The World Inside Your Eyes,” that’s John Harrison, Sputzy Sparacino and Delilah. Sputzy was also in the local Pittsburgh bands Modern Man and Sputzy and the Soul Providers.

Additionally, there are plenty of zombie cameos. Here are the ones that I know of:

Romero is a zombie pushing a cart wearing his trademark plaid scarf.

The former Dean of Fine Arts in Carnegie Mellon, Akram Midani, is a fisherman zombie.

The band NRBQ are zombies inside the mine.

Howard Berger from KNB is a zombie and Greg Nicotero is Johnson, one of the army troops.

The mines where this is filmed go miles below the ground and are where many archival prints of movies are stored, including the movie this was intended to be, Gone With the Wind.

When Monkey Shines came out on video, I was probably 16 and had watched Dawn of the Dead hundreds of times. I was also an edgelord kid who hated everything and didn’t like this at all. I didn’t understand that directors can change and grow. I just wanted more gore.

Based on the book by Michael Stewart, this was director and writer George Romero’s first major studio feature and had — for him — a big budget of $7 million. Shooting in Pittsburgh — Carnegie Mellon and Murrysville are two of the locations — in the late summer and early fall of 1987, this had a long post-production and editing process as Romero shot more film than he ever had before, plus had to learn to work with live monkeys.

That said, there are also four Tom Savini-designed puppets. If you guessed that Frank Welker does her voice, you are correct.

After athletic law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) is hit by a truck, he loses control of his arms and legs and must learn to live in a wheelchair controlled by sips and puffs, which is nearly all he can do. His friend Geoffrey (John Pankow) suggests that he get a helper monkey and specialist Melanie Parker (Kate McNeil) helps him by getting Ella trained in working with him. It lifts his spirits and he finds himself growing close to Melanie.

The secret is that Geoffrey has been experimenting on these monkeys and is close to losing funding if he doesn’t get results. He has injected Ella with a special drug that boosts her intelligence. What he doesn’t know is that it causes her to share emotions with Allan, first him feeling her ability to run through the grass in his dreams, then killing a bird that drives him crazy and even setting the home of the surgeon who may have screwed up his operation — and now lives with his ex-girlfriend — on fire and killing the man and his lost lover.

Now the rage that goes through both of them begins to feed on itself and everyone in their way pays, even if Allan doesn’t want it to happen. While this has a studio-demanded happy ending — spoiler warning, he crushes the monkey with his wheelchair which doesn’t seem all that happy — Romero filmed a different way to close this, as Geoffrey’s boss Dean Harold Burbage (Stephen Root) steals the remaining drugs and injects them into all of the test monkeys. After Allan regains his ability, Burbage is assaulted by animal rights protesters who had earlier attacked Geoffrey for experimenting on monkeys. When he returns to his lab, we learn that the monkeys have completely taken him over.

Romero said of the ending, “I thought my ending played well, but I’d admit that the testing results were overwhelmingly in favor of the current version. To Orion’s credit, they said —  it’s up to you, we’ll release it either way. So I decided to go along and not fight it. But I’ll always miss it.”

I may like this more than I did when I first saw it, but it remains the first film where I noticed that I wouldn’t necessarily love every movie by every director, even George Romero. Supposedly, he had to cut half of what he shot to hit the right length of the film, but even still, it feels like there is both too much going on and too little of a story at the same time, which I realize is a juxtaposition.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was on the site all the way back in December 22, 2017.

I learned about this movie from John Waters and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that John Waters has never let me down. He said of the film, “I wish I had kids. I’d make them watch it every year and if they didn’t like it, they’d be punished.”

Christmas Eve 1947: Harry Stadling (played later in the film Brandon Maggart, who is the father of Fiona Apple) watches his father — dressed as Santa — get sexy with his mother. He gets so upset that he smashes a snowglobe and uses it to slice up his hand.

Fast forward to 1980: Harry wants to be Santa. He sleeps in costume, his home is constantly decorated for the holidays, he works in the Jolly Dreams toy factory and keeps a book of who is naughty and who is nice. Of note, the toy factory was owned by the family of producer Edward R. Pressman and was known for making the board games Triominoes and Mastermind.

Harry notices an employee that called in sick is at the bar, even after he had to fill in for the man on the assembly line. He gets so mad that he smashes one of his dollhouse figures and cancels Thanksgiving. There’s a bright spot, though, as his boss announces that if they increase production, they can give toys to the kids at a hospital.

Harry realizes that everyone sees him as a loser, so he has a nervous breakdown and becomes Santa. He starts making toys in his basement and steals toys from the factory to give to the hospital. But he also does some insane things — like leave dirt on a bad kid’s door. And oh yeah — he murders a bunch of young adults who make fun of his costume, an act which his co-workers witness.

Harry goes full nutzoid, destroying his nephews’ gifts and replacing them with toys he’s made and killing a co-worker and leaving more toys behind. He attends the company Christmas party and dances to an increasingly faster and more frenetic version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” before threatening to put people in his bad book.

Then, Harry activates the assembly line and makes more toys before getting his van stuck in the mud. He escapes a mob who recognizes him as a killer before making it to his brother’s house. A battle ensues between the two, but Harry escapes and he’s forced to drive his van off the bridge by the mob. But in his mind, the van flies off like Santa’s sled to the words of “The Night Before Christmas.”

Obviously, this is not the movie to share with the kids. But if you’re an adult who has had it up to here with the holidays, by all means, this is the tonic you’re seeking.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Well, maybe Weirton made. This was shot in West Virginia, about 36 miles from Pittsburgh, but when it comes to something made that close, the Steel City will claim it. Super 8 is set in Lillian, Ohio and if you’ve been to the place where PA, WV and OH all touch, it’s hard to tell when you’re in each state. It’s such a nexus of all realities that there’s still a Sam Goody — one of two in existence — in St. Clairsville.

Directed and written by J. J. Abrams, who produced with Bryan Burk and Steven Spielberg (who this movie is beyond in debt to), Super 8 is about Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his friend Charles Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths) making a zombie movie in their backyard. Their friends Preston Scott (Zach Mills), Martin Read (Gabriel Basso), Cary McCarthy (Ryan Lee) and Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) play the various roles, with Joe and Alice growing close despite the hatred between their fathers. This is due to Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard) showing up drunk to work and Deputy Jack Lamb’s (Kyle Chandler) wife Elizabeth (Caitriona Balfe) having to cover his shift and dying in an accident. Jack blames Louis and as a result, Louis won’t allow his daughter to see Joe. Small town drama, let me tell you. It’s still real, as my mom just informed me of so many crazy things she just learned getting her hair done.

One night, the kids sneak off and film at midnight. They accidentally see a pickup truck driven by their teacher Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman) ram the train and cause it to explode. They try to help him as he pulls a gun and tells them to forget what they have witnessed.

Soon, people are disappearing, dogs are running away and the military — led by Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich) — have declared martial law. When Alice disappears, the kids all had to their school where they find a film that Woodward made when he worked in the government. They learn that the Air Force captured an alien which eventually formed a psychic connection with Woodward, asking him to help escape our planet. The Air Force wanted to make it into a weapon, so Nelec destroyed Woodward’s standing and discharged him.

I really loved this movie and what follows, a harrowing take on the Spielberg kids racing round their backyard to save the world, a storyline that would become much better known when Stranger Things ran with the idea. The kids look like kids, their love of making movies is something I felt at the same time in my youth and it’s awesome seeing a neighborhood that looks like the one I grew up in on film.

That said — no movie has more lens flares. Seriously, there’s even an extended one at the end that twinkles out. Another takes up the middle of the frame. Lens flares for everyone! You get a lens flare! You get one! Look under your seat! Everyone is going home with a lens flare!

I love Pittsburgh to the point that even talking about it makes me tear up a bit. Rick Sebak’s voice makes my soul weep. And yet I hate Kennywood. Maybe it’s because I dislike waiting in lines. Perhaps it’s because my parents didn’t have the money to take us there. It could also because they got rid of Garfield’s ride and I’ll never forgive them.

Director and writer Greg Mottola grew up around Adventureland in Farmingdale, New York, but he went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where he probably went to Kennywood and realized that it’d be a filmable place to set his movie in which James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), a recent graduate from Oberlin, has to work at instead of. going to Europe the summer after graduating. There, he meets and falls for Em Lewin (Kristen Stewart), an art history major who teaches him more than he probably learned in college as he spends the hot summer days working in the carny games booths on the midway.

There’s some good casting choices here, like having Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader as the husband and wife owners, Ryan Reynolds as the too old to be sleeping with college kids maintenance man and Wendie Malick as James’ mom.

For some reason, Lou Reed is idolized in this movie. Now, I wasn’t around Kennywood in 1987, but I know that in my hometown, the original choice — Neil Young — is way more Pittsburgh. And outside of the folks that listened to WXXP, hardly anyone in tahn would be listening to Big Star, Hüsker Dü, The New York Dolls and The Jesus and Mary Chain, but hey — it’s a movie.

Beyond being filmed at Kennywood, other scenes were filmed in McCandless, Beaver County and Moon Township around the airport, including the Stardust Lounge.