Retro Reviews

Tourist Trap is a 1979 American horror film directed by David Schmoeller and starring Chuck Connors, Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness, Robin Sherwood, and Tanya Roberts. It is an unnaturally entertaining flick, even if not absolutely perfect. Check out the trailer: The film follows a group of friends who become stranded …

On March 28th, 1979, Phantasm was released in U.S. cinemas, introducing horror fans to the dark, existential coming of age tale surrounding young Michael (A. Michael Baldwin) as he battles interdimensional minions, a flying silver sphere of death, and a menacing undertaker known as The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) alongside …

The dead don’t mess around. In this article, we venture into one of the genre’s most strange and surprising terrors: Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. I didn’t find this movie until the ripe age of 17. I was well seasoned in horror, I knew what I liked. Then I …

The best horror often blurs the lines between reality and fiction. When relatable terror combines with the realm of the seemingly impossible in a soup culled in the style of “The Twilight Zone,” the audience is both glued to the screen in fear and mystified by the endless possibilities.  This …

Grindhouse Releasing is amazing at cleaning up those old classics! Their stellar editions of The Beyond and Cannibal Holocaust are among my favorites. So, my curiosity was definitely piqued when I heard they were releasing Impulse, a seldom seen film from director William Grefe (Mako: The Jaws of Death) starring …

Infamous Euro-sleaze director Jess Franco (Vampyros Lesbos) tried to capture that luscious Technicolor magic of Hammer Studios’ gothic horror films of the 50s and 60s on several occasions. Most notably with Count Dracula (also 1970), and even managed to lure fright legend Christopher Lee away from the fabled studio for …

Another chip off the old “Castle Rock,” Children of the Corn is a horror film released in 1984, based on a short story of the same name by Stephen King, which was first published in 1977 in the March issue of Penthouse (a publication I never heard of before) and …

Picture this, if you will. A group of miners are trapped in an enclosed space with a big monster on the loose trying to kill them one by one, and the company they work for is responsible for it. You may be thinking “Ah, Alien” right? WRONG! 10 years after …

The announcement that Zack Snyder (300, 2006) would be remaking George Romero’s classic, Dawn of the Dead (1978) (read our retro review here) got a resounding, ‘that’s sacrilege!” from myself and my crowd, which, at the time, the only place we would be screaming this other than toward each other was …

There are a few films in my personal collection that I consider particularly brutal, and I only watch them once every so often. They’re not exactly light-hearted entertainment. The subject matter is gritty, real, and drawn out to an uncomfortable degree. Very realistic. Wes Craven’s original The Last House On …