Everyone knows horror auteur Rob Zombie wrote and directed two Halloween films – which performed so well the franchise has since been handed over to screenwriter Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green for yet another retooling – but what the casual movie-watcher may not know is that five...

(For a film-by-film breakdown, see Part 1.) Films: 8 Total runtime without credits or flashbacks: 11 hours, 17 minutes, 9 seconds Total Michael Myers kills: 68 Overall KPH: 5.9, or a kill every 10 minutes and 10 seconds. Eliminating the Michael-less H3, the 7 films run 9 hours, 45 minutes, with...

Since 1978, Halloween hasn't just been a day to worship Satan and eat small candy bars. It's also been a celebration of a long-running, highly influential film series about a masked killer: Batman. Just kidding. Trick-or-treat! It's Halloween, John Carpenter's seminal stab-fest that was...

Practical Magic (1998) pits the magic of women against the villainy of an abusive man while showing the power of sisterhood. The movie equates witchcraft with feminism, reflecting the historical reality that witch trials have been used to punish the behavior of transgressive women. Through the...

The Devil has been a prominent part of film since its inception, but the depiction of Lucifer has changed with the times to reflect humanity’s vices. Let’s look at how Lucifer has transitioned from the big-horned behemoth into the shifting shape of a man he is today. (In the interest of time...

Obsessive compulsive disorder is an incredibly tough mental illness to live with. While numerous movies and TV shows portray OCD as a wacky personality quirk, the reality of it is much more complex and is far removed from the cliché that our society perpetuates. Hell, all you have to do is take a...

In 2004, I was committed to a mental hospital in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the middle of the night. I couldn’t recall why. The last thing I remembered flittered through my consciousness like static between radio stations. It was the movie Darkness Falls and three of Montclair’s finest firemen...

If you've ever read anything about silent film, you've likely seen the image of an impossibly pale, kohl-eyed Theda Bara wearing little more than two gravity-defying snakes coiled around her breasts. It's as iconic an image as Charlie Chaplin in his tramp garb when it comes to encapsulating the...

What does it mean to be a black man in America? If we believe the media, it means you’re a target or some kind of miscreant. In part because of the tone set by the current Administration, these stereotypes are promoted as truth and used as justification for the mistreatment of black men by...

It takes a special talent to direct the weirdest Nightmare on Elm Street, a franchise that eventually stepped outside of itself for an entire movie about making another Nightmare on Elm Street, and not even realize it’s a feature-length treatise on closeted homosexuality. But Jack Sholder...

E.2.: The Extra-2rrestrial Thirty-five years after having his childhood disrupted and his worldview shattered by the arrival of an alien being, a divorced, alcoholic Elliott (Henry Thomas) is just starting to become functional again (with the help of his sister, Gertie, who's now a therapist) when...

Star Wars creator George Lucas often talks about his motivations for creating the iconic franchise. He wanted to recreate the fun adventures from the sci-fi serials he loved as a child, and to give kids a moral, mythic tale about good and evil in the stark, morally gray cinematic era of the late...

Two genre masterpieces were released on the same day in the summer of 1982, both exploring a world in which hard-boiled blue-collar characters struggle to survive in an oppressive, inhospitable landscape, hunted by beings that only appear to be human. One of these films — John Carpenter’s The...

This weekend will see a lot of people saying aloud or to themselves, “They remade Flatliners?” That same question will resurface in a few months when it’s released on home video, and then the film will most likely never be spoken of again. While it should eventually recoup its low $20 million...

While David Cronenberg has been synonymous with “body horror” for most of his career, it has been close to two decades since he made a feature (1999’s eXistenZ) that could be classified as such. (It’s also been that long since he directed one based on his own script.) In that time, his...