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This week’s batch of home media releases are an eclectic bunch of titles, where there’s definitely a little bit of something for everyone headed to Blu-ray and DVD tomorrow. As far as new films go, the award-winning Promising Young Woman is being released on both formats, and Rlje Films is keeping busy this Tuesday with their releases for both PG: Psycho Goreman and last year’s Castle Freak reimagining. Mill Creek Entertainment is putting out a killer Steelbook edition of Rad, and for those who are looking to check out some classic genre fare, Arrow has put together a special edition double feature release of The Invisible Man Appears and The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly, which has never been available outside of Japan until now.

Other releases for March 16th include Tower of Evil, I Am Lisa, Konga TNT, The Stay, The Parish, Sacrilege, and Todd.

The Hong Kong – Asia Film Financing Forum (Haf) today unveils the lineup for its 19th edition (HAF19), with 29 projects from established Asian directors and producers such as Hur Jin-Ho, Kawase Naomi, Ning Hao, Ogigami Naoko, Wang Bing, Yee Chih-Yen, emerging filmmakers like Cai Chengjie, Oliver Chan, Roya Sadat, Yang Mingming, as well as nine first-feature directors.

Returning to its regular March slot, HAF19 will run concurrently with the 25th Hong Kong Filmart (Filmart) from 15 to 17 March. It will again take place online following Haf’s first-ever virtual edition held in August 2020.

“Despite the challenging circumstances brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, Haf remains strongly committed to filmmakers,” Haf director Jacob Wong said. “We will have our dedicated online meeting platform this year for accredited Haf and Filmart participants to schedule and conduct meetings directly. It’s hassle-free and user-friendly, requiring no download or additional log-on.”

HAF19 selected the 29 projects, including nine documentaries,...

Line-up includes nine documentaries and nine first-time feature directors.

The Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (Haf) has announced the 29 projects selected for this year’s edition, including established Asian directors and producers such as Hur Jin-Ho, Naomi Kawase and Ning Hao, as well as emerging filmmakers and nine first-time feature directors.

Returning to its regular March slot, Haf will take place online from March 15-17, coinciding with Filmart Online, which runs March 15-18. Haf and Filmart also took place virtually in August 2020.

“Despite the challenging circumstances brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, Haf remains strongly committed to filmmakers,” said Haf director Jacob Wong.

About 10 years ago a daikaiju short film from director Daisuke Sato based off of Ray Bradbury’s short story The Fog Horn was discovered, and monster fans rejoiced! Now Sato is back with a sequel, and we have your first look! Prepare yourselves for Howl from Beyond the Fog! The flick features the same creature, Nebula, from […]

The post Another Kaiju Lets Out a Howl from Beyond the Fog appeared first on Dread Central.

The Christmas season is a special time for many. A chance for friends to gather and spread cheer, or clans to gather in the warm glow of familial love. Sometimes, however, the warm glow cools down, love turns to hate, and the carving knife is put to more insidious uses. Welcome to ABC’s Home for the Holidays (1972), a fun murder mystery filled with proto-slasher goodness.

Originally broadcast November 28th as part of the ABC Tuesday Movie of the Week, Home for the Holidays was up against CBS’s Hawaii Five-o and NBC’s The Bold Ones: The New Doctors (whatever that was) and had a solid showing, as ABC often did with this particular brand. However, you won’t find any Snoopies or undernourished trees in this Holiday special.

Let’s open our eggnog soaked TV Guide and see what’s going on around the tree:

Home For The Holidays (Tuesday,...

Stars: Jill Haworth, Bryant Haliday, Dennis Price, George Coulouris, Anna Palk, William Lucas, Anthony Valentine, Jack Watson, Derek Fowlds, Derek Fowlds, Gary Hamilton, Candace Glendenning, Dennis Price, Robin Askwith, Seretta Wilson | Written by Jim O’Connolly, George Baxt | Directed by Jim O’Connolly

Set in deserted lighthouse on fog-shrouded Snape Island, the terror of the Tower of Evil begins when a nude, crazed woman slaughters a sailor who visits the island. When she is taken back to civilization, she is found to possess an ancient relic; and so the authorities mount an expedition to solve a mysterious series of psycho-sexual murders…

I distinctly remember the very first time I saw Tower of Evil, it was on British TV – around the same time as the classic BBC 2 Horror double bills, so around 1993-95 – and, as someone who equated British horror with the likes of Amicus and Hammer, seeing the gloriously...

Have you ever heard a parent say, “I’m not especially fond of children, but I love my own!”? That’s kind of how I feel about zombies. So when I got the offer from Blanc/Biehn Productions to make my feature directorial debut, guess what…

Yep: zombies!

If you’ve followed my career as a horror critic, you know that while I try to be as fair and balanced as possible, I’m always at a slight disadvantage when reviewing zombie flicks because they’re my least favorite.

So why, when actress-producer-uberwoman Jennifer Blanc-Beihn and highly imaginative executive producer Lony Ruhmann approached me earlier this year about writing and directing a saucy suspenser based on one of Lony’s loglines – “pinup girls vs. zombies” – did I say yes?

Anyone who knows me well enough to know I don’t love zombies should also know that my passion for style,...

McM Comic Con and Memorabilia Birmingham take place this weekend, March 22nd-23rd, at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre (NEC). Unlike the huge event that is McM Comic Con London, this event is on a smaller scale – focusing more on memorabilia and the attending autograph guests. Having always attended the London event we took time out last November to attend our first McM Comic Con/Memorabilia Birmingham and enjoyed it so much we’re heading back this weekend.

But why should you attend? Well here’s out Top 5 reasons to attend McM Comic Con/Memorabilia Birmingham:

1) The Guests

As with any McM event, the guest list for Birmingham is packed with a veritable smorgasbord of actors and actresses from movies, television and anime. Plus for the more grown-up nerds there’s even an appearance from the odd glamour model and porn star!

My personal highlights for this weekends event are...

With so many cult titles from the Eighties and Nineties making their way to Blu-ray of late, it shouldn’t be too surprising to see a few more obscure titles also getting a digital upgrade. For example, the 1980 fright flick The Unseen. Any of you seen it?

Can’t say I’ve ever seen The Unseen. Good thing Scorpion Releasing will be putting it out on Blu-ray August 13th so I can find out what I’ve been missing.

Synopsis:

Freelance reporter Jennifer and her two friends, Karen and Vicki, accept an invitation for cheap room and board in a large farmhouse offered by a friendly, but shady museum owner named Ernest Keller since all the motels in and around town are booked for a holiday parade fair Jennifer is covering. But unknown to the women, some unseen "thing" has been living in the basement of the house for over...

The definition of a slasher film varies depending on who you ask, but in general, it contains several specific traits that feed into the genre’s formula. Author Vera Dika rather strictly defines the sub-genre in her book Games of Terror by only including films made between 1978 and 1984. In other words, she saw it as a movement. When someone describes Brick, they don’t define it as a noir, but instead neo-noir . In other words, it’s a modern motion picture that prominently utilizes elements of film noir, but with updated themes, content, style, visual elements or media that were absent in those from the 1940s and 1950s. So does one consider Scream a slasher film or a neo-slasher, or simply put, a modern slasher?

Some consider Thirteen Women to be the earliest slasher – released all the way back in 1932. Personally I think that is rubbish. Thirteen Women is more like Desperate Housewives on sedatives.

All moviegoing human beings go through a horror fixation at some point, and part of that ride is discovering that scary movies feature pleeeeenty of hot men. Sure, it's mostly the female babysitters and big-breasted sorority girls who steal most of the screen time, but tons of notable horror flicks feature hunks in key roles. And in key death sequences. Which is somehow therapeutic to me. Don't ask.

In honor of October's shadowy pall, here are the 10 greatest hunks of horror. Pay attention, because some of these gents may pop up again in our Best Movie Ever column this month.

10. Rider Strong, Cabin Fever

Cabin Fever is so gross, but so righteously bizarre. Part of its appeal is the eminently lovable Rider Strong, the Boy Meets World alum who rents a cabin in the woods with his idiotic friends and suffers the wrath of a disgusting virus. But before the bloody bombast takes over,...

Snape Island never brought anything but unhappiness and tragedy for anyone Lighthouses are creepy, Ive always felt that. Maybe its the loneliness of it all, or maybe its the towering above the angry sea, guiding the way of passersby but never knowing if one of them is going to crash into you and bring death with them. Lighthouses are the haunted mansions of the sea side community. I dont know. What I do know is that Tower of Evil only fee…...

Another lost classic has been resurrected by the loonies over at Scorpion Releasing. Dig on all the details regarding Satan's Slave and find out how you can get your own devilish servant below.

From the Press Release

On March 20th, Scorpion Releasing and Katarina's Nightmare Theater present Norman J. Warren's Satan's Slave. A young girl (Candace Glendenning, Tower Of Evil, Flesh And Blood Show) moves in with her Uncle Alexander (Michael Gough, Batman, Berserk, Konga) after her parents' car mysteriously explodes. After being taken in by her cousins, she soon begins suffering strange visions. But what she doesn't know is that her planned role in the house is more sinister than she could have expected. Starring horror icon Michael Gough and Martin Potter (Goodbye Gemini) and directed by cult director Norman J. Warren (Terror, Inseminoid), Scorpion Releasing proudly presents the complete uncut version.

Special Features

Play with or without...

Hey, little piggies! Is everyone ready to pull back the shower curtain on the latest episode of American Horror Story? Careful - there's a big bad Persian Armenian wolf set to blow the house down and an undead housekeeper set to blow - well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

We start the episode, as usual, in a flashback. Constance (Jessica Lange) is crying in front of a crackling fire. Speaking of fire, a pre-burn Larry the Burn Man (Denis O'Hare) walks in and hangs up the phone behind her. She tells him that they're charging her with criminal child neglect or something like that - is she talking about Tate shooting up his school?

She makes an offhand reference to the child in question, noting, "Now you know how he is when he's not supervised" and mentions a name - Carl? Gal? Bowl? Damn you and your Old Dominion whispering,...

Canny film producer known for his horror and sci-fi classics

The producer Richard Gordon, who has died aged 85, was involved with several offbeat classics of horror and science-fiction cinema. These included Arthur Crabtree's Fiend Without a Face (1958), which climaxes with a still-astonishing siege of a power station by disembodied, tentacled, malicious human brains, and Antony Balch's Horror Hospital (1973), a lively and perverse mad-scientist satire featuring Michael Gough and Robin Askwith.

It may be that Gordon and his brother, Alex, so closely associated that many reference sources mistakenly say they were twins, were the first people to take the now-common route from movie-crazed kid to industry professional, later the path of film-makers as different as Jean-Luc Godard and Steven Spielberg. As schoolboys, the Gordons founded a film society, then wrote for fan magazines and performed menial roles on low-budget productions, always motivated by a boundless enthusiasm for the films...

With thoughts from Tom Weaver on the producer of Devil Doll.

Prolific author and legendary film buff Tom Weaver has been a friend of Tfh since before we existed, and his essential series of book-length interviews with horror/sci fi filmmakers, writers and actors has mirrored what we try to do here at the site, which is disseminate information and opinions on the movies we all love.

Tom’s latest book examines the career of Devil Doll producer Richard Gordon, friend of both Karloff and Lugosi, one of the first fans-turned-pro and whose long career has finally ended. Richard was 85.[More about The Horror Hits of Richard Gordon here.]

Here’s Tom:

As Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog once pointed out, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (etc.) are called the first people to have grown up movie nuts and then become moviemakers themselves, but Years before them came Alex and Richard Gordon, who loved movies as kids in England, belonged to fan clubs,...

Actor best known for her roles in Exodus and the Broadway musical Cabaret

The producer-director Otto Preminger had an eye for blue-eyed blondes, casting two complete unknowns, the 19-year-old Jean Seberg in Saint Joan (1957) and the 15-year-old Jill Haworth in Exodus (1960), with mixed results. In Preminger's rambling, all-things-to-all-people saga about the birth of Israel, Haworth, who has died aged 65, played Karen Hansen, a young Danish-Jewish girl searching for her father, from whom she was separated during the second world war. She falls in love with a radical Zionist (Sal Mineo), but is killed during a raid and buried in the same grave as an Arab, a symbol of reconciliation between the two peoples. Despite a phoney accent and the fact that she had never acted previously, Haworth was cute and touching in the significant role.

She then appeared in two more of Preminger's overstretched epics on huge subjects: The Cardinal...

Eva Marie Saint, Jill Haworth in Otto Preminger's Exodus Actress Jill Haworth, who was seen in a handful of movies and television shows since 1960 but who was best known as Broadway's original Sally Bowles in Cabaret, died Monday, Jan. 3, of "natural causes" at her home in Manhattan. The British-born actress was 65. Among Haworth's film appearances are three minor roles for Otto Preminger: Exodus (1960), as Sal Mineo's girlfriend; The Cardinal (1963); and In Harm's Way (1965). Haworth had larger roles in a few other movies, but those were minor fare. Among them were B-horror flicks such as It! (1967), a retelling of the Golem tale co-starring Roddy McDowall; The Haunted House of Horror (1969), opposite former teen idol Frankie Avalon and veteran Dennis Price; and Tower of Evil / Horror on Snape Island (1974), with Bryant Haliday. Considering some of the reviews the inexperienced Haworth received, her Sally Bowles [...]...