Director: Robert Young
Year released: 1972
THE CHARGE: Bringing a circus full of vampires to town. But in all fairness, I guess they're not any scarier than clowns.
THE EVIDENCE: Vampire Circus opens with vampire Count Mitterhaus killed by local townsfolk. Not many films have the nerve to kill off their most important character in the first five minutes, but there we are. But before dying, he curses them, swearing that their children’s blood will return him to life. Just like when Dick Cheney was kicked out of the White House.
Director: Robert Scott
Year released: 1987
THE CHARGE: Video killed the living dead star? Meh, I got nothing.
THE EVIDENCE: In this piece of 80’s fromage, Zoe and Jeff are a couple of teenagers moving into a new home their parents just bought, though their folks are out of the country. Because after purchasing a home, it’s perfectly natural to want to be several thousand miles away from it. Yep, thirty seconds into the movie and we already have our first plot hole.
Director: Nacho Vigalondo
Year released: 2007
THE CHARGE: Rolling the clocks back instead of springing forward. I hate daylight savings time.
THE EVIDENCE: I've previously written about director Nacho Vigalondo's film Open Windows and found it to be a major disappointment. So I recently revisited his feature film debut Timecrimes, which really wowed me the first time I saw it years ago, to see if it was as good as I remembered. I'm happy to say that the film not only still holds up, but a second viewing made me appreciate it even more.
Director: John Carpenter
Year released: 2011
THE CHARGE: Being a bit too hard on The Beaver last night
THE EVIDENCE: John Carpenter has directed some iconic horror flicks: Halloween, The Fog, The Thing and the woefully underrated In the Mouth of Madness. So you would think that The Ward, the first feature film he’d directed in nearly ten years, would be a big deal; a project worthy of an auteur returning to his milieu. But then you remember that this is the same John Carpenter who directed Escape from L.A., Ghosts of Mars and the overrated snoozefest Prince of Darkness. And suddenly, the mediocrity of The Ward makes a lot more sense.
Director: Robert Eggers
Year released: 2015
THE CHARGE: Weighing the same as a duck and therefore being made of wood (wink wink, nudge nudge)
THE EVIDENCE: Now here's a polarizing piece of celluloid. Robert Eggers's 17th century period piece has been hotly debated around the interwebs. Some consider it the scariest film ever made while others call it an overhyped snoozefest. Well, your good friend Judge Hammer has finally had a chance to weigh the evidence and I'm here to let you know that the truth falls, as it usually does, somewhere in the middle. The Witch is a legitimately frightening film, but not without its flaws.
Director: Aditya Vishwanath
Year released: 2016
THE CHARGE: If a shadow falls and no one's around to hear it, does it make a good movie?
THE EVIDENCE: Senka and Jonas are a young couple in the early stages of building a life together when Jonas throws a monkey wrench into their plans by getting himself perished. But Senka won't let him get away that easily. Ignoring the "till death do us part" section of their vows, she makes a Faustian deal with a demon named Amis to bring Jonas back to her. Things then take some very bad turns, because Shadows Fall wouldn't be much of a horror film if everything went smoothly.
Director: Pang Ho-cheung
Year released: 2010
THE CHARGE: Taking advantage of a killer real estate market
THE EVIDENCE: Young urban professional Cheng, working multiple jobs, finally scrapes up what she thinks is enough cash for a down payment on a luxury apartment. Sadly, a sudden surge in the housing market jacks up the price and puts it out of her financial reach. But she REALLY wants this apartment. She wants it so badly, she'd be willing to kill or die for it. Well, maybe not die...
Director: Anders Jacobsson
Year released: 1995
THE CHARGE: Practicing evil without licensing or documentation of proper training. Record keeping is important, people!
THE EVIDENCE: Evil Ed opens with a scene of a film editor sitting in front of an editing machine. You see, kids, in years gone by, movies were recorded on something called "film" and this "film" had to be manually cut and sliced together in order to create a movie. Well, the person in front of this particular machine is going completely mental and when the head of the movie studio enters the room to tell him to knock it off, the editor puts a grenade in his own mouth and pulls the pin. After being covered with gore, the studio head promptly fires the deceased editor.
Director: S. Craig Zahler
Year released: 2015
THE CHARGE: Forcing a head-on collision between two distinct film genres and charging admission to view the wreckage.
THE EVIDENCE: A couple of no-good sidewindin' bushwhackin' varmints stumble upon a burial ground and before you know it, one of them ends up deceased. The other takes refuge in a town run by Sheriff Kurt Russell and his majestic sheriff-y beard, but he may have unwittingly led some rather agitated cannibalistic tribesmen to an all-you-can-eat buffet. But the cannibals prefer to get their food to-go, and drag some townsfolk back to their caves. Will Sheriff Kurt and his beard save the day?
Director: Patrick Brice
Year released: 2014
THE CHARGE: He's a creep. He's a weirdo. What the hell is he doing here?
THE EVIDENCE: Josef is dying. He advertises on Craiglist for someone to film his last days, and to impart wisdom to a young son who will grow up without ever getting to know his father. Aaron answers the ad and it doesn't take long before he gets the sense that there's something... off about Josef. But hey, a job's a job, right? Even if it's the last job Aaron might ever take...
Director: Steven Goldmann
Year released: 2008
THE CHARGE: Offering a double-wide dose of delightful dread.
THE EVIDENCE: In case you haven't noticed by now, I watch a lot of horror flicks. My wife is kind enough to sit through most of them with me. And when we popped the tantalizingly titled Trailer Park of Terror into my DVD player, we did so with the lowest of expectations. With a title like that, how could we expect anything but a laughable and ultimately forgettable b-movie? So imagine my surprise when, about a half hour into it, I turned to my wife and asked, “Is it me or does this movie actually NOT suck?” She answered, “It’s not just you. This really is GOOD!”
Director: Richard Hiltzik
Year released: 2008
THE CHARGE: Sleepwalking through the worst case of sequelitis in many moons.
THE EVIDENCE: The original Sleepaway Camp introduced audiences in 1983 to teenage gender-confused serial killer Angela. It's considered a controversial classic for two reasons: 1) many of the campers who swear like sailors on shore leave, including some of the killer's victims, are played by actors actually under the age of 18 and 2) it features the most bizarre final frame of any movie in the history of film-making.
Director: Rick Jacobson
Year released: 2009
THE CHARGE: Not being the biography of WWE's Stephanie McMahon. (That's a pro wrestling joke. You see, she likes to slap people a lot and... oh, never mind.)
THE EVIDENCE: If you ever watched women’s professional wrestling and thought “this would be a lot better with some blood and some lesbian tongue wrasslin’”, then stop whatever you're doing - and if you really think along those lines, I don't think I want to know what you're doing - and watch Bitch Slap immediately!
Directors: Katsuyuki Motohiro & Naoyoshi Shiotani
Year released: 2015
THE CHARGE: Not being bad, just being drawn that way.
THE EVIDENCE: I'm throwing a little bit of a change-up into the blog today, passing judgement on a recently released anime film. Don't worry. There are no Pokemon, Digimon, Dragonballs or Ben-Wa balls to be found here. In fact, today's movie is a poitical thriller with a heavy sci-fi influence, a few horror elements and an occasional burst of splatterific gore for color. So let's dive in and see what Psycho-Pass: The Movie is all about.
Director: Marc Fratto
Year released: 2015
THE CHARGE: Kidnapping. But is it really a crime if the guy you kidnap is the Antichrist?
THE EVIDENCE: Amazon Prime has become a breeding ground for horror. From A-list titles to zero-budget exploitation flicks, it's all there. And with probably ten times the number of titles as Netflix, it's become my go-to for checking out movies that are under the radar. Hell Fire is one of those titles, capturing my attention with its titillating cover shot of a bound man looking between the legs of a scantily-clad gun wielding woman. I went in with high hopes and low expectations... and was completely blown away.
Director: Michael & Peter Spierig
Year released: 2003
THE CHARGE: Bringing Australians back from the dead. ZOMBIE ZOMBIE ZOMBIE, OI OI OI!
THE EVIDENCE: Meteorites carrying an alien virus smash into a Australian village, killing the townsfolk and then turning them into zombies who crave human flesh. (Has there ever been a zombie who didn’t?) A small group of survivors takes refuge in a bomb shelter but, realizing there are almost no supplies to sustain them, try to figure out how to get past the zombie hordes and get out of town. The task proves to be far more difficult than they expected, but it’s not because of the zombies...
Directors: A whole bunch of them
Year released: 2016
THE CHARGE: Encouraging cinematic ADHD by hopping onto the anthology bandwagon.
THE EVIDENCE: Let's get this out of the way: I don't care much for anthology films. Most of them are lazy endeavors held together by the loosest of threads. They're generally the refuge for directors who have ideas but neither the budget nor the expertise to develop them into full length features. But the success of anthologies like the V/H/S and ABCs of Death movies have ensured that we'll be accosted by these short film collections for some time to come. Holidays is one the most recent additions to the genre and, like almost all anthologies, offers stories of varying quality.
Director: Can Evrenol
Year released: 2015
THE CHARGE: Serving up 31 frosty flavors... of TERROR.
THE EVIDENCE: Foreign horror films can make for interesting viewing. Sometimes it reveals universal themes that are frightening regardless of your nationality or background, like the extreme horror of the French films Martyrs and Inside. Sometimes it reveals unique motifs to specific to the culture of the film's origin, like the dark humor of the Israeli film Rabies or the socio-economic motives behind the violence in the Japanese film Dream Home. Baskin, filmed in Turkey, falls between those two ends of the spectrum, giving what seems to be a very local flavor to universally nightmarish concepts.
Director: Michael Steves
Year released: 2015
THE CHARGE: Being the only horror movie I know of that's named after dingleberries.
THE EVIDENCE: Peanut butter and chocolate. Beer and pretzels. Jennifer Lopez and Judge Hammer. They're all examples of things that go great together. Clinger wants to check if the same applies to to teen Disney comedies and graphic horror, and the results are pretty much what you'd expect.
Director: Roger Corman
Year released: 1962
THE CHARGE: You got Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Price and Roger Corman and can't come up with a better title than that?
THE EVIDENCE: Tales of Terror is one of several collaborations between Vincent Price and director Roger Corman to bring the works of Edgar Allan Poe to the big screen. This one’s a little different from their other films in that it doesn’t focus on one story. Rather, it’s an anthology that presents three Poe tales: Morella, The Black Cat and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. Price appears in all three and provides a voice-over introduction to each of the stories as well.
