Retro Reviews

My love for Jason Voorhees and the iconic Friday the 13th film series began at a very young age. Some might say too young: long before Jason Lives, in fact. It started with Part 2 on HBO when I was probably 7 or 8 years old. The original followed, and then Part …

Once upon a time, before most of us ditched cable, we were entertained by the simplest genre offerings. For me, most of those films were SYFY Originals, although I despise the weird modernized name for the Sci-Fi channel. That doesn’t matter; what matters is that you could see some amazing …

The Collector, released in 2009, is one of my all-time favorite movies. I am thrilled and honored to get to write an article about it to celebrate its fifteenth (15!) anniversary. I don’t honestly remember its initial release, as it was during a period of my life when I didn’t …

I spent a lot of time in the Mayan indie theater in high school and college, but I never saw it with a line around the block and people as excited as the night one movie came out: The Blair Witch Project. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez on …

Doug Sakmann and Lloyd Kaufman made this work in 2003. I will admit here that these movies are wrong now. But it’s all so bad that I love it. Watching your heroes die in extreme ways, with minimal CGI, stole my heart. Why was there no more? I don’t precisely …

There is not one horror fan in the world who doesn’t know the name George A. Romero. It’s common knowledge that he is a legend. However, he wasn’t just the king of the Zombies; George was so much more, from working with Mr. Rogers to pandemics that make people stone-cold …

The most gut-wrenching scene from any 1980s children film has to be from The NeverEnding Story (1984). As a child, watching Artax succumb to the Swamps of Sadness in the film was devastating and left me sobbing hysterically. It is not any better rewatching this scene 40 years later as …

In an understandable attempt to be different, Jason Takes Manhattan begins with a Charles Bukowski-esque poem about how “I love this city,” and visual scenes of how tough New York City is. To kids like me who lived in a small town, it was something to see. Of course, Jason Voorhees …

A lot of film nerds wax nostalgic about the “classic” films of the 1980’s and early 90’s. By “classics” they generally mean the slasher flick boom, the original Star Wars trilogy, Indiana Jones and the like. But some of us long for the days of batshit crazy, over-the-top, mind scrambling …

Growing up, I got sick a lot. My parents just went off to work, and I would watch Summer of Sam all day. I feel familiar with it, so we are doing a 25th Anniversary review. Unfortunately, this movie fell off many RADARs, even though it made a lot of …