We play the ‘ol switcheroo here a lot during Shocktober. Originally, I had an Ozploitation flick planned but I wanted to group that with another Ozploitation film I’m doing later. Instead, I’m going to say a few words about an underrated flick from one of the greats, George A. Romero. The film? Martin. Never heard of it? Well, you should, and you should try and see it as soon as possible.

In a time when vampire movies were gentleman wearing capes, living in haunted castles, Martin was something completely different. Martin was modern, following none of the pre-established monster movie conventions. Not only that but Martin was funny. Martin was as much a dark comedy as a horror film, which is possibly the reason it has been mostly forgotten by the general public. But don’t let that fool you, there’s nothing that sucks about this bloodsucker.

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Donald Sutherland. Jeff Goldblum. Leonard Nimoy. Has a greater triumvirate of actors ever been assembled? Did I mention this movie has dog with a human head? How about a cameo by Robert Duvall as priest on a children’s swing set? There’s been a lot of incarnations of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers (four by my count) but none of them have been quite as imaginatively terrifying as the 1978 version from director Phillip Kaufman (The Outlaw Josey Whales, The Right Stuff) and screenwriter W.D. Richter (Buckaroo Banzai, Big Trouble in Little China). Time to point our fingers and scream.

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Because I’ve been in the Shocktober spirit lately, I revisited an old T3 podcast in which we talked about our favorite horror movies.  I remember there’s one point where Sean says he had trouble drawing the line between what constitutes a horror movie and what constitutes a thriller, before John says “That’s my life.”  And as a non-horror aficionado this hasn’t ever been a huge problem for me, but I can certainly see how it could be frustrating for someone who obsesses over these kinds of movies.  And in fact, I kept having to grapple with this thin bloody line between genres as I was watching The Fury, which felt to me like a thriller for about 3/4 of the movie and then goes into some pretty over-the-top directions that gave it much more the tone of a horror movie.  And since that last 1/4 sticks out a lot more in my mind than the first hour-and-a-half, I say The Fury is a horror movie, if a somewhat half-baked one. Continue reading →

Jaws is a landmark film. It was the film that started the idea of the summer blockbuster. A film so successful the market was instantly flooded with countless knockoffs, one of which Shocktober explored yesterday with Colin’s review of Kingdom of the Spiders. Why did everyone want to make the next Jaws? Because Jaws showed all you needed was some colorful characters and an animal threat and you could make infinite money.

Orca may not have been the most egregious of these knockoffs–that title belongs to the 1981 pile of Italian schlock Great White, a movie Universal sued into oblivion–but Orca is up there. That being I said, I do sense Orca has something else driving it. A film in search of an identity, but unfortunately it could never swim away from what it truly was a big, wet, salty, knockoff.

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