The Cherry Hill Chainsaw Massacre

Last week, I reviewed the first half of co-writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace's 1990 made-for-TV adaptation of Stephen King's 1986 psychological sci-fi horror novel, It . Even though both halves comprise a single movie, I decided to treat each one individually, as watching them in one sitting would have resulted in approximately a three-hour viewing. No, thanks. As relaxing and undemanding as the activity of watching a movie may be, there's still a limit as to how long I can sit on a couch and devote my full attention to the screen before me. An hour and a half is plenty long enough, especially when it pertains to a production as enjoyable but mediocre as Wallace's miniseries.  In the last sentence of my review for It: Chapter One , I expressed dread over this week's self-imposed assignment, that of viewing and reviewing the second episode. Growing up, the first episode was one of the scariest and most purely enjoyable creature features my young, easy-to-please eyes ...

You know that feeling when you loved a movie from your childhood, only to grow up, watch it several years later, and realize that it wasn't all your little naive mind made it out to be? That perhaps the majority of critics were accurate in their assessment that it was just okay, or maybe even flat-out bad? For me, there are several horror films that fall into either of those unfortunate categories, and some sting sharper than others. Having lost my affection for the Wishmaster and Leprechaun franchises represent no great loss. But Rick Rosenthal's Halloween 2  is a whole other story. Once my favorite of the Halloween sequels growing up (that hospital setting and the quiet simplicity of the premise were the bomb!), the last time I watched it, which, in a way, was the first real time, it was nothing more than a boring slasher about uninteresting people running to and from hospital rooms, up and down the hallways, while Laurie Strode, once a resourceful, fiercely protective mama b...

In 1974, Tobe Hooper, with assistance from co-writer Kim Henkel, wrote and directed one of the most sensational, groundbreaking, and traumatizing entries in the still-young slasher subgenre of horror, introducing audiences to an entire family of inbred, redneck cannibals led by the iconic chainsaw-wielding, flesh-wearing Leatherface. In 1975, Steven Spielberg, directing from a screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, the former of whom wrote the novel on which the film was based, produced a landmark in the field of natural aquatic horror that rendered audiences petrified to set foot in the ocean and reminded us that not all monsters come from the safe, distancing realm of fiction. Theoretically, what should you expect when you get a horror movie that positions both trailblazing filmmakers at the helm of a supernatural horror movie? Why, the Spielbergian emphasis on humanity coupled with the Hooperian gritty, documentarian realism, of course. Unfortunately, the end result is, in ...