Today’s horror comedy short is an oldie but goodie from slapstick pioneer Mack Sennett titled GHOST PARADE. This send-up of “old dark house” chillers stars Andy Clyde, Harry Gribbon, and Marjorie Beebe. A little creaky but still fun to watch, here’s 1931’s GHOST PARADE:

From the early films of Georges (A TRIP TO THE MOON) Melies, to the horrors of H.G.Clouzot (LE CORBEAU, DIABOLIQUE), to the vampire madness of Jean Rollin, France has a long history with le cinema fantastique. EYES WITHOUT A FACE is one of the most eerie of all French horrors, it’s dreamlike quality capturing the viewer, even with subtitles. I’m not a big fan of foreign films, but EYES WITHOUT A FACE stood out to me as a perfect example of how quiet horror can be just as effective as full-throttle terror.

The story unfolds slowly, deliberately, as we see a woman (Alida Valli) driving down a lonely highway. There’s someone or something in her backseat, bundled up in a hat and topcoat. The woman pulls over when a car comes behind her, nervous, scared. When it passes, she carries what we now see as a female corpse, dropping it into the Siene River…

If only I’d known something about this flick back when it first came out (on home video — it never screened in theaters as far as I know) in 2012, I’d have been cheerleading for it a lot sooner.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that director Derek Cole’s An American Ghost Story (also released under the title of Revenant) is necessarily all that great, but damn if it isn’t plenty good, and it gets a lot more from its $10,000 budget (yes, you read that right) than most Hollywood “efforts” with ten times, one hundred times, or even one thousand times the money to burn. Any movie that packs a punch this far above its weight class is one worth crowing about, so let me take a few minutes, in the spirit of “better late than never,” to do just that.

Struggling-and-broke writer Paul Anderson (played…

Hey, how about this? Looks like we’ve got two modern-day “creature features” in a row on our humble little review site here, since we’re following up 2014’s fun, blood-soaked monster movie Animal with another flick from the very same year, Dark Was The Night, that treads much the same ground and is also, in keeping with our theme for the month, available for your enjoyment (hopefully, at any rate) in Netflix’s instant streaming queue.

Shot on Long Island. director Jack Keller’s deliberately-paced, cool-blue-tinted opus takes a bit of getting used to from a visual standpoint, but by and large the limited color palette he employs is reasonably effective and communicates a sense of dread and unease throughout without tipping over into “a little too self-consciously stylish for its own good” territory. It comes close a times, mind you, but on the whole it just manages to maintain its balance.

Last night I took a look at the classic British horror anthology Dead of Night. Today’s Saturday Matinee movie is a not-quite-so-classic anthology from 1967. It does star two of horrordom’s great classic actors, though: John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr. Also featuring Rochelle Hudson, who acted with everyone from Will Rogers to James Dean, here’s GALLERY OF HORROR:

The horror anthology film has been around since the silent era. German cinema began the trend with Robert Oswald’s EERIE TALES (1919), Fritz Lang’s DESTINY(1921), and Paul Leni’s WAXWORKS (1924). Things were quiet on the anthology front during the first talking horror cycle of the 1930’s, but the format was revived by Julien Duvivier in his 1943 FLESH AND FANTASY, linking three tales of the supernatural. Britain’s Ealing Studios came up with one of the best in the genre ever when they released 1945’s DEAD OF NIGHT. This influential classic chiller and is still the gold standard for horror anthologies, with many of its themes and its wrap around storyline being used by horror filmmakers for years to come.

Architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) is summoned to a countryside home by Eliot Foley (Roland Culver). Craig has the strange feeling he’s been here before, and is filled with a sense of dread. He recognizes the people…

I found this 2007 Canadian horror-comedy hybrid on The Movie Channel and stashed it in my DVR for future reference. After viewing it, I’m on the fence about recommending it. FIDO tells the tale of a 1950s world where a radioactive cloud from space caused the dead to rise. A great Zombie War was waged, and the ghouls were contained by Zomcon, an official government agency. Now the zombies are fitted with collars to control them and used as servants. The more feral ones are banished to “The Wild Zone”, outside the fences of cities.

The story focuses on young Timmy Robinson (K’Sun Ray), a lonely boy picked on at school by bullies. His mother Helen (Carrie Ann Moss) gets him a zombie companion (Billy Connelly). Timmy names the zombie Fido and the two bond, much to the chagrin of dad Bill (Dylan Baker). When Zomcon Head of Security Mr. Bottoms (Henry Czerny) moves…

So, like, whatever happened to good, old-fashioned, practical effects-based “creature features,” anyway?

That’s a question I find myself asking (to myself, I admit) every once in awhile, that’s for sure, but I won’t be doing it anymore after last night.

Why is that? Because last night I finally got around to checking out director Brett Simmons’ 2014 indie horror effort Animal on Netflix, and it proved to me that the genre I thought I was missing is, in fact, very much alive and well.

There’s nothing too terribly complicated on offer here, sure, but that’s a good thing — screenwriters Thommy Hutson and Catherine Trillo seem to have a definite checklist they’re working from, and as far as I’m concerned there’s absolutely no shame in that as long as you’re able to get all the boxes ticked off, which they most assuredly do with their story about a big ol’…

As somebody whose college years are well behind them, I’m not quite sure what to make of the conflicting information I hear about the social scene on campus here in the not-so-early-anymore years of the 21st century. On the one hand, I’ve read a number of articles saying that the days of hard partying are pretty much over with thanks to dating apps like tinder that allow kids to hook up in minutes and have therefore pretty much nullified the need for large social gatherings in order to meet people of the opposite (or same) sex. Heck, I’ve even heard that the popularity of all these “instant dating” opportunities has put a fair number of bars out of business. On the other hand, though, there are movies like 2013’s +1 (also known by the alternate title of Shadow Walkers) that would seem to posit that not only is the…

There are good “found-footage” horror movies.

There are bad “found-footage” horror movies.

And then there are Asylum “found-footage” horror movies.

Usually setting their tales at or near the scenes of purportedly “real” paranormal “hot spots” or the stomping grounds of infamous serial killers (although all their flicks are shot in California), the no-budget, straight-to-video “moguls” who run The Asylum follow pretty much the same formula every time : hire an eager kid either right out of film school or looking to get in to direct it, give him or her an HD video camera, hire a bunch of uniformly good-looking guys and gals who are out  to pad their meager acting CVs, get the ladies to take their shirts (at least) off, mix in a bit of dodgy CGI effects work meant to be indicative of “ghostly”  activity ( I really wanted to say “paranormal activity” there, but the name’s…