Summer of Slash: Capsule Reviews

Every year I do this Summer of Slash series, I watch more than I end up writing about. This is mostly because I only want to write about the slasher films that I either enjoy enough to write more than two paragraphs on or lend themselves to be written about. And let’s be honest, taking the entire slasher subgenre into consideration, there aren’t too many that fit that criteria. A lot of the movies I watch for this summer series lend themselves better to the capsule format than the essay, so I figured rather than just scraping the notes I had written for these films, I would just present to you a very rough paragraph or two for each film in capsule format. It’s safe to say that the bulk of the movies that get capsule reviews fall into that “for slasher fans only” category. Enjoy.

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Summer of Slash: Capsule Reviews, Part 4

Back with some capsule reviews.  These have been in the can for a while, but a mixture of grad school, work, and the hard drive for my desktop computer blowing up it's been a bugger of a time getting some new horror posts up.  I have a review for Maniac ready to go, too, but I'm still waiting for my computer to get fixed so I can get some screencaps up (my Netbook doesn't have a disc drive). In these capsule reviews you'll find brief thoughts on the Ozploitation version of Rear Window, a zombie movie penned by the man who came up with the idea for Alien, One of the best worst movies I've ever seen (one that would make Umberto Lenzi proud), and possibly one of the worst horror sequels I've ever seen.  Reviews after the jump...

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Summer of Slash: Wolf Creek

Greg McLean's homage to Ozploitation films is one of the most effective slasher films I've ever seen. The 00's gave birth to the most disgusting and schlocky subgenre – the torture porn – and Wolf Creek unfairly got lumped in with the likes of Saw and Hostel. However, when one looks at McLean's film compared to those monstrosities it's easy to see why so many horror mavens prefer McLean's unflinching snapshot of horror in the outback to the snarky tone of most torture porn. Wolf Creek blindsided me with how effective it was, and in the way McLean doesn't look upon his characters as plot devices or mere "dead teenagers" who are paying for their "sins" of youthful exuberance (they aren't just props to be severed and humiliated for our entertainment); no, there's not a drop of Eli Roth-like cynicism found in Wolf Creek, just an unflinchingly horrifying realism and seriousness to the material and the fate of the characters.

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Summer of Slash: Capsule Reviews

In an effort to get through as many horror films as I can for the upcoming horror countdown at the wonderful blog Wonders in the Dark (for which I will be a contributor, and the main inspiration for this summer Horror project) I have decided to cram a bunch of reviews into one post (which I will do frequently) since I need to save time, it helps, too, that a lot of horror movies can't really sustain an entire post on their own, so the capsule review becomes a life (and time) saver. I will reiterate my "rules" for this project: I am mostly focusing on slasher films (hence the title of this project), but I am not limiting myself to just once kind of horror film since I need to (re)watch a lot of them before I construct my list for the Wonders in the Dark countdown. Therefore, I am planning on mostly cramming all of the non-slashers (and some that can only have about a paragraph written about them) into these capsule-review posts to make my life a lot easier. This week the viewing schedule consisted of the low-budge slasher The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Joe Dante's beloved werewolf feature The Howling, the Ozploitation romp Razorback (from the director of Highlander!), and 2010's dystopian vampire sci-fi/horror hybrid Daybreakers. Reviews come after the jump...

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