Few things are more fundamentally terrifying than knowing you’re prey to some unknown aquatic creature lurking in the depths, and Hollywood has fed well on our love of underwater terror. With scores of prehistoric man-eating predators on the loose in Piranha 3D, we decided to take a look at three movies that explore killer creatures [...]
————– The Serbian spotlight at this year’s Fantasia Film Fest is not for the squeamish. Actually, in the case of two of its films, it might not be fit for viewing by conscious beings – making it perfect fare for the deranged cousin of Sound on Sight we like to call Sordid Cinema. The two [...]
Fantasia, North America’s biggest and best genre film festival, is a unique experience. Nowhere else can you hold your wife’s hand through a lighthearted J-punk romantic romp in the afternoon, and spend the night jerking off to Josef Mengele’s version of scat porn. Tonight, Sordid Cinema brings you one of many tastes of Fantasia’s delicacies, [...]
Fantasia kicked off this past weekend, and it brought with it a remake of one of the most notorious exploitation flicks ever, the rape-revenge horror movie I Spit On Your Grave. We survived the screening and lived to let you know if either version is actually any good, or just more cheap trash. Also out [...]
There are some who would say that the Western genre, one of the fundamental underlying narratives of American culture, has been done to death. But there are those who would use psychotropic drugs and earth magicks to bring the genre back to life, sort of like Frankenstein at Burning Man. Jonah Hex, the latest in [...]
Before director Vincenzo Natali, Canadian horror was perhaps best known for helping Corey Haim pay his rent and David Cronenberg funnel grant money into his latex and slime fetish. But then came 1997’s bloody low-budget sci-fi film Cube, an indie darling that proved that talent and perversion don’t always go hand in hand. Okay, maybe [...]
The dream – or nightmare – is a staple of the modern horror movie. After all, even as manipulative as the device is, it’s still a proven way to jolt an audience. Filmmaker Wes Craven understood this bit of cinematic psychology when he concocted the central idea behind A Nightmare on Elm Street, a title [...]
Local director Alexandre Franchi seems to have hit on a nerve with audiences with his first feature, the hybrid genre flick The Wild Hunt, which primarily concerns a Live Action Role Playing weekend gone strange. After winning the First Canadian Feature prize at TIFF last year, it has finally hit the local multiplex, so we’ll [...]
In today’s world of office jobs, income tax, and formal evening wear, it’s no wonder that audiences want to fantasize about a simpler time, a time when the day was spent not filing or typing, but dismembering enemies with broadswords and then using their skulls as mead chalices and their blood as lubricant while sodomizing [...]
Horror director George A. Romero has always been known for the social commentary of his films, the political subtext his fans claim transform his gore flicks into the equivalent of a Jackson Pollack painting made with intestines. The Crazies, from 1973, is just such a film; a story about a bioweapon that’s more a platform [...]
On the fifth edition of the special blend on Sound on Sight we like to call Sordid Cinema, it’s an hour of intercontinental experimental horror. Corey Feldman stars in Eugenio Mira’s impossible-to-find dark comedy/thriller hybrid The Birthday, Christopher Guest regular Bob Balaban (!) directs Randy Quaid in the grisly Parents, effects man Brian Yuzna runs [...]
What Herschell Gordon Lewis is to gore, Russ Meyer was to big breasts. And also sometimes gore, which made him a bit like a walking version of that Hustler cartoon with the naked lady in the meat grinder. Tonight, Sordid Cinema, the younger, less popular cousin of Sound on Sight—you know, the one that always [...]
According to the recently released documentary Not Quite Hollywood, not only has Australia discovered talking pictures, they’ve also figured out how to use them to get women naked and impaled by spear guns. You learn something new every day. Tonight, on Sordid Cinema—the more boorish, blood and semen-stained cousin of Sound on Sight—we’re going to [...]
In 1968, director George A. Romero transformed cinematic zombies from a bunch of brain-damaged Haitians working on farms to a cannibalistic apocalyptic plague with Night of the Living Dead. The influential film was also helped solidify horror as a genre which filmmakers could experiment with fantasy as social allegory, draping metaphor in flayed skin and [...]
In 1968, director George A. Romero transformed cinematic zombies from a bunch of brain-damaged Haitians working on farms to a cannibalistic apocalyptic plague with Night of the Living Dead. The influential film was also helped solidify horror as a genre which filmmakers could experiment with fantasy as social allegory, draping metaphor in flayed skin and [...]
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