Author: VHS Tracking

  • Burial Ground (1981)

    Burial Ground (1981)

    As an Italian zombie flick, Burial Ground (1981) spends a lot of time with decaying zombie faces in close-up, crud-strewn make-up with maggots wriggling around. I couldn’t help but wonder… did the make-up artist apply the maggots carefully with a tweezer, or did they just dump a bucket upside down the zombie’s head and see… Read.

  • Pale Blood (1990)

    Pale Blood (1990)

    Somewhere between TV shows like Silk Stalkings and Forever Knight, there’s the direct-to-video horror thriller, Pale Blood (1990). A hang over of Miami Vice aesthetics employed in the service of arty genre trash. And yet, there’s a certain elegance here, thanks to the stoic presence of George Chakiris (from the original West Side Story) as… Read.

  • Pumpkinhead (1988)

    Pumpkinhead (1988)

    Reading a TV Guide description of Pumpkinhead (1988) as a kid, the type of movie that would only be programmed super late at night on a weekend, always intrigued me. A man gets revenge on the bikers who killed his boy by raising up a supernatural creature. Reading that it was directed by Stan Winston,… Read.

  • Alison’s Birthday (1981)

    Alison’s Birthday (1981)

    Alison’s Birthday (1981) lets you know it’s an Australian horror story through the shot of a Cold Chisel album on the floor when a seance goes haywire.  At age 16, Alison (Joanne Samuel from Mad Max) is mucking around with a ouija board with a couple of school friends, and receives a warning from the… Read.

  • Creepy (2016)

    Creepy (2016)

    There’s a masterclass sequence in Creepy (2016) that shows off Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s command with visually increasing uneasiness. A retired detective now a college professor Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima from Drive My Car) is working with his former partner Nogami (Masahiro Higashide) on a cold case, a missing family who disappeared five years ago. Within the university… Read.