Commentary

The apparition in “Suburban Gothic” looks like something that David Lynch might have cooked up on the budget of a sock puppet show. Following 2012’s delightfully acidic coming-of-age-cum-horror tale “Excision” with this more deliberately cheeky flick that is several shades lighter than its pitch-black predecessor, director Richard Bates, Jr.’s vision is one part Coscarellian fever dream and one […]

Well, the title kind of says it all. But for all its ambition as a schlocky drive-in exploitation flick/homage to author H.P. Lovecraft, “Call Girl of Cthulhu” only periodically amuses on the level to which it aspires. Feeling protracted even at a reasonable 93 minutes, the story follows virgin Carter (David Phillip Carollo), an artist […]

At this rate, the next installment of this popular horror anthology series will need to be called “V/H/S: WTF?”. Adding a third film to the grisly catalog, “V/H/S: Viral” breaks from the rules of the found-footage genre in hopes of giving ardent fanatics something new, and succeeds roughly half the time, the other half perhaps being […]

Wherever this resurgence of interest in the Bigfoot legend spawned from, it seems to be working in favor of found-footage horror films. Last year, it was Bobcat Goldthwait’s “Willow Creek”, a suspenseful, surprisingly charming slow-burn that followed a young couple into the titular Pacific Northwest wilderness in hopes of capturing the beast on video. While of the same […]

Where “The Dead” was a beautifully lensed horror/adventure story with an intelligently intertwined humanitarian message, its sequel, “The Dead 2″: India” (playing opening night at the 9th annual Spooky Movie Festival at AFI Silver), is weighed down with too much melodrama to tread in the same socioeconomic undercurrent. The result is a movie that looks […]

“Astray” is a pretty bland parable about trust, forgiveness and redemption that drives towards its fundamental moral with roughly the verve of an instructional video for social workers. It’s hard to criticize a film for sending such a positive message, but writer/director Kyle Romanek approaches the material from an elementary level and doesn’t challenge the […]