Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 10/23.

"As one of the last zombie productions before George Romero revolutionized the genre with Night of the Living Dead, and as the only work of the genre ever made by the infamous Hammer production company, The Plague of the Zombies is a prime example of routinized filmmaking done right," writes Rob Humanick.

Also: "Gleefully tossing aside any perceived notions of good taste, Re-Animator established its maker as a premiere genre master in the same vein that Blood Simple and The Terminator announced the Coen Brothers and James Cameron to the world. Stuart Gordon's foray into the outer limits of life, death, and heads carried about by their decapitated former bodies is a nearly operatic exercise in splatter, hilarious and horrific all at once and utterly without apology."

And: "In this most apocalyptic of genres, Shaun of the Dead is not unlike a ray of unexpected sunshine - even if it has a little red on it."

"Even if it is by any estimation little more than a cheesy movie, the strange Hammer/Shaw hybridization that is The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires offers an unique object lesson in confused cross-cultural perceptions of East and West and even a kind of odd early model of an increasingly globalized film industry," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

Also: In The Penalty, Lon Chaney plays Blizzard, "a Mabuse-like figure, moving his underlings like figures on a chessboard, laying down his spider's web over the city," writes Ian Johnston. "There are some striking similarities with Lang's master criminal, but the connections with both Norbert Jacques's novel and Lang's film Dr Mabuse the Gambler (respectively appearing one and two years later) are doubtless coincidental.... There's a historical background to what seems now a rather bizarre twist to the film's story. The late 19th and early 20th centuries had seen a series of anarchist attacks and assassinations (the background to novels like Dostoevsky's The Possessed, Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent) and in 1919, the year before The Penalty's release, a series of bombings and attempted bombings took place, part of the so-called Red Scare."

"One of the my favorite vampire films is Roger Vadim's haunting and surreal Blood and Roses (Et mourir de plaisir, 1960), which recently made my list of '31 films that give me the willies,'" writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "I truly think that Vadim's impressive horror film is equal to other revered classics made at the same time such as Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) and Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960)."

Bill Gibron at PopMatters: "How to Become a Homemade Horror Director in 10 Easy Steps."

"Ottawa's prolific Duke of Doom Brett Kelly is springing his remake of Kingdom of the Vampire onto DVD buyers and is now in preproduction on a redo of the fondly remembered 1959 swamp monster flick Attack of the Giant Leeches," and Harvey F Chartrand talks with him for Penny Blood.

In the San Francisco Bay Area? Brian Darr has several seasonal recommendations.

Online viewing tip. "Theme Song Sondheim returns, just in time for... HALLOWEEN!" exclaims Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

Online viewing tips. "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is no horror film, but the scene in which young Pee Wee encounters truckdriver Large Marge on a dark lonely stretch of desert highway bears all the makings of one," writes Phil Morehart at Facets Features. Also, another from "the grandfather of the 'torture porn' genre, the Japanese film, Evil Dead Trap."

Posted by dwhudson at October 23, 2007 10:04 AM