House By The Cemetery

Gory Gory Hallelujah

All you really need to know is that an evil murderer is in the cellar. The rest of the story is erratic, confusing, and worst of all boring.

Lucio Fulci is an Italian director known for having gruesome killings in his movies, and "House By The Cemetery" is no different. Yet, this movie somehow managed to be ghastly boring. There were several bloody deaths that peppered the tedium, including a scissors through the head, a scissors through the heart, a throat being sliced open with a knife, and many more. The entire time I was watching, I was either checking my watch or wincing from the onscreen brutality.

The music sounded so eighties, and the dubbing was hilariously bad. Whenever the young boy spoke, I couldn't help but chuckle. It didn't have that b-movie charm that has drawn me to many other old horror movies, mostly because it seemed like there was a fairly big budget.

The Italian horror genre has a lot of hype behind it, and recently I decided to see what the hype is about. "House By The Cemetery" has been my first foray into Italian horror, and I'm hoping that this was not one of the better movies of the genre. I plan on watching Italian horror standards "Zombi" and "Suspiria" in the future. Hopefully those will fair better.


--Below Average

The Happening

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You


Human extinction is a subject that is worth some thought. A natural disaster is plausible, and a natural disaster can be downright scary if we don't know what is going on.

M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed "The Happening," a tense sci-fi thriller about a small group of people that are running from an unknown toxin that is being released into the air. Shyamalan directed one of my favorite movies called "Signs." That movie was all about suspense and shadows, while "The Happening" was all about carnage and b-movie style.

Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel gave stiff performances that somehow seemed natural in a movie such as this. John Leguizamo had the hardest role to play, as a father who left his child behind with friends; but he was quite convincing.

Overall, "The Happening" was creepy; and it had one jump-out-of-your-seat moment, which seems to be a requirement for thrillers these days.


--Above Average

Blood Feast

The Birth Of Gore


In 1963, a monumental film was premiered at a drive-in in Peoria, Illinois. This film would break new ground, and become a cult classic.

When I had the chance to watch "Blood Feast," about 45 years later, I was amazed to find out that the very first gore movie premiered in Peoria, about 20 minutes from my home. There's an old saying: "Will it play in Peoria?" "Blood Feast" played in Peoria phenomenally well, due to word of mouth.

What was all the chat about? Explicit Gore. And lots of it. There had never been anything like this, in all of it's full-color glory. By today's standards, "Blood Feast" is unrealistic and tame. But I still enjoyed the film because of the b-movie charm and the buckets of bright red fake blood. There was plenty of over-the-top acting, gooey gross carnage, and the chief of police was reading his lines off of his hand!

Writer/director Herschell Gordon Lewis would go on to make many more bloody, campy, gooey movies (including "The Wizard of Gore" and "The Gore Gore Girls"), but none of them would have the same impact as "Blood Feast."

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