Special Effects (1984)

What I enjoy about Larry Cohen is how he approaches things as a writer: the story’s gotta have a hook! Released in the same year as Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Cohen’s film Special Effects (1984) is a comparable twist on a Hitchcockian thriller. The hook: What if a movie director was a murderer? (A […]

The Ambulance (1990)

I distinctly remember reading Marvel comics when I was a kid, Spider-Man or Captain America, and they always included a little editorial from Stan Lee, and there were a few issues of him promoting The Ambulance (1990), a thriller starring Eric Roberts that was written and directed by Larry Cohen (Q – The Winged Serpent, […]

Body Snatchers (1993)

Merging my horror movie viewing in the lead up to Halloween with my on-going retrospective of director Abel Ferrara’s filmography this year, I thought I would revisit Body Snatchers (1993), his sci-fi horror film for Warner Brothers. If it wasn’t for the later box office bomb of the Nicole Kidman starring The Invasion, this was […]

Guilty As Sin (1993)

Next to the 90s erotic thriller is the sexy courtroom thriller, all of which tends to be coated in references to Hitchcock. Guilty As Sin (1993) is scripted by genre stalwart Larry Cohen (The Stuff, Phone Booth) and directed by Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon), and I remember commercials for it at the time, […]

A Return To Salem’s Lot (1987)

This was a wacky one. Part of the wave of Stephen King adaptations that were only tangentially related to their source material and clogged up the video shelves in the late 80s and early 90s, A Return To Salem’s Lot (1987) is a sequel to Stephen King’s novel and the TV miniseries, which is directed […]