Not to be confused with the band White Zombie, but this is a great horror flick if you have not seen it.

Check it out!

White Zombie

A young man turns to a witch doctor to lure the woman he loves away from her fiance, but instead turns her into a zombie slave.

Young couple Madeleine and Neil are coaxed by acquaintance Monsieur Beaumont to get married on his Haitian plantation. Beaumont’s motives are purely selfish as he makes every attempt to convince the beautiful young girl to run away with him. For help Beaumont turns to the devious Legendre, a man who runs his mill by mind controlling people he has turned into zombies. After Beaumont uses Legendre’s zombie potion on Madeleine, he is dissatisfied with her emotionless being and wants her to be changed back. Legendre has no intention of doing this and he drugs Beaumont as well to add to his zombie collection. Meanwhile, grieving ‘widower’ Neil is convinced by a local priest that Madeleine may still be alive and he seeks her out.

Wait, there’s more:

Bela Lugosi followed up his star-making role in Dracula with this ambitious low-budget horror film from the Halperin brothers, who effectively transplanted the misty gothic mood of the Universal horror films to their poverty-row studio. White Zombie drips with atmosphere from the opening, as eerie chanting accompanies the credits and Madeleine (Madge Bellamy) arrives at midnight to witness a mysterious burial before coming face to face with the satanic looking Murder Legendre (Lugosi with goatee and searing eyes), a hypnotist and voodoo master who has been supplying the local mills with an army of zombie laborers. Madeleine’s nightmare is just beginning. Having landed in a world of almost perpetual night, where hollow-eyed zombies lumber through the sugar mill and the ghostly town is eerily bereft of living souls, she becomes the object of desire for Legendre, whose plan to possess her involves her initiation to the world of the undead. This first zombie movie is also one of the best, with Lugosi’s archly sinister performance dominating the film (thankfully obscuring a lot of overacting by supporting players), and astounding sets and gorgeous matte paintings creating a wondrous sense of poetic doom. –Sean Axmaker

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Starring: Terry Potter, Pete O’Herne Director: Peter Jackson Yes, Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings

Bad Taste - The population of a small town disappears and is replaced by aliens that chase human flesh for their intergalactic fast-food chain.

Could a title be any more direct? New Zealand maverick Peter Jackson made a splash (well, more of a splatter) with this film debut, a slapstick gross-out comedy about an alien fast-food franchise that turns a small town into a cheap source of meat. All that stands in the extraterrestrials’ way is the Alien Investigation Defense Service (yes, it’s a tasteless gag), a bunch of would-be Rambos who take on the aliens with axes, rocket launchers, and chainsaws. Jackson mines vomit jokes, dismembered corpses, and brain-spattering gore for over-the-top laughs and succeeds with inventive low-budget effects, crack timing, and sheer exuberance. Not bad for a film made on weekends with homemade props and a bunch of energetic mates. Jackson topped himself a few years later with the even more outrageous and hilarious bloody gut-buster Dead Alive.

The limited-edition two-disc set also includes the documentary featurette “Good Taste Made Bad Taste,” a revealing “making of” shot at the time of production and featuring behind-the-scenes footage of Jackson’s home-made special effects, and a 16-page booklet with cast interviews. –Sean Axmaker

A must for the horror maniac!

Add this great movie to your collection: Order Bad Taste DVD

Tonight, I think I’ll just put on Cube. Fear… Paranoia… Suspicion… Desperation

7 complete strangers of widely varying personality characteristics are involuntarily placed in an endless kafkaesque maze containing deadly traps.

Here’s another opinion:

If Clive Barker had written an episode of The Twilight Zone, it might have looked something like Cube. A handful of strangers wake up inside a bizarre maze, having been spirited there during the night. They quickly learn that they have to navigate their way through a series of chambers if they have any hope of escape, but the problem is that there are lethal traps awaiting if they choose their route unwisely. Having established some imaginative and grisly punishments in store for the hostages, cowriter and director Vincenzo Natali turns his attention to the characters, for whom being trapped amplifies their best and worst qualities. The film is, in fact, similar to a famous episode of Rod Serling’s old television series, though Natali’s explanation for why these poor people are being put through hell is a lot closer to the spirit of The X-Files. Cube has some solid moments of suspense and drama, and the sets are appropriately striking: one is tempted to believe at first the characters are lost inside a computer chip. –Tom Keogh

If you haven’t seen this one yet, check it out soon.

Order it: Cube

When a government-run lab accidentally lets loose a deadly virus, the population of the world is decimated. Survivors begin having dreams about two figures: a mystical old woman, or a foreboding, scary man. As the story tracks various people, we begin to realize that the two figures exemplify basic forces of good and evil, and the stage is set for a final confrontation between the representatives of each.

After a government-spawned “superflu” wipes out more than 90 percent of the earth’s population, the devastated survivors must decide whether to support or resist the advances of a mysterious stranger from way down South (heh-heh) who wishes to claim this new world order for himself. Although the six-hour length makes it nigh-impossible to digest in one sitting, this well-paced adaptation of Stephen King’s apocalyptic magnum opus ranks among the best adaptations of the author’s work, with strong performances from Gary Sinise, Miguel Ferrer, and especially Jamey Sheridan as a good-old-boy version of Old Scratch. The opening scene, set to the strains of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” is one of the most chilling things ever shot for television. Director Mick Garris is no stranger to King’s world, having also helmed Sleepwalkers, the recent television remake of The Shining, and the upcoming Desperation. –Andrew Wright

Stand DVD

Tags: Stephen King

Bubba Ho-Tep (Limited Collector’s Edition) (2002)

Don Coscarelli directs and Bruce Campbell stars as the King of Camp in this intentionally over-the-top schlockfest. Bubba Ho-Tep is partially about Elvis Presley and partially about the title character, an Egyptian cowboy zombie, but mostly it is about camp. The movie is equal parts story and back story. We learn through narration and flashback how Elvis didn’t really die, ending up instead in a rest home in East Texas with JFK (played by Ossie Davis), who was dyed black and had his brain removed, presumably for reasons of national security. Campbell and Davis realize that something strange is going on when their rest-home compatriots start dropping off suspiciously. The whole movie leads up to a final showdown to the death with the Egyptian cowboy zombie who has been sucking the souls of their fellow residents because he thought no one would notice. The movie unfolds a bit slowly; it is, after all, a geriatrics-fight-Egyptian-cowboy-zombie movie. However, one wishes this self-conscious movie’s pacing took its cue from the atypically fast-moving zombie instead of from the senior-citizen Elvis and JFK. In the end, though, Campbell is flawless as the aged King; his accent, intonations, glasses, and trademark karate are at the same time sincere and over the top. –Brian Saltzman

Bubba Ho-Tep may have the most substantial and most worthwhile bonus features of any single-disc DVD release. “The Making of Bubba Ho-Tep” focuses on effects, make-up, and the musical score (which includes Don Coscarelli interviewing the composer, Brian Taylor). While the focus isn’t on the filmmaking itself, the 45-minute, four-part documentary (which can be viewed in segments or in its entirety) is an insightful exposé with lots of screen time for Bruce Campbell and Don Coscarelli discussing the success of the film on the festival circuit and the financial and industry challenges of making an “Elvis and JFK aren’t dead Egyptian zombie” movie that is set in Texas. The making-of is the heart of the bonus features, but there are also a couple of deleted scenes, a photo gallery, TV and theatrical trailers, and two commentary tracks, one by Campbell and Coscarelli and one by Campbell playing Elvis (”the King”). The limited edition also includes a small scrapbook liner note insert with photos and a brief letter from Bruce Campbell. –Brian Saltzman

Bubba Ho-Tep (Limited Collector’s Edition)

Submitted for your approval: The Twilight Zone’s inaugural season, all 36 episodes complete with Rod Serling’s original promos for the following week’s episode, not seen since their original broadcast. To discuss television’s greatest anthology series whose title has become pop culture shorthand for the bizarre and supernatural is to immediately become like Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd in Twilight Zone: The Movie; a can-you-top-this recall of famous shocks and favorite twists. Several essential episodes hail from this season, among them, “Time Enough at Last” starring Burgess Meredith as a bespectacled bookworm who is the lone survivor of an atomic blast; “The After-Hours” starring Anne Francis as a department store shopper haunted by mannequins; and the profoundly disturbing “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which fear and prejudice turns neighbor against neighbor (and, by the by, whose alien observers inspired Kang and Kodos on The Simpsons).

From an unsettlingly persistent hitchhiker to a malevolent slot machine, The Twilight Zone’s first season did plumb “the pit of man’s fears.” One forgets how moving the series could be. Three of this season’s most memorable and enduring episodes are the poignant and primal “stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off fantasies, “Walking Distance,” “A Stop at Willougby” and “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” in which desperate characters seek refuge in a simpler past. Serling’s few stabs at comedy (”Mr. Bevis,” “The Mighty Casey”) have not aged well, but the series finale, “A World of His Own,” starring Keenan Wynn as a playwright whose fictional characters come to life, has a brilliant capper. The episodes are more deliberately paced than one might remember. Less patient younger viewers might be anxious to get to the payoffs, but once they settle into the rhythm, they will savor the literate writing and the performances by such veteran actors as Ed Wynn, Everett Sloan, and Ida Lupino, and newcomers such as Jack Klugman. The extras, including the unaired version of the pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?”, audio commentaries and recollections, and a Serling college lecture, truly take this six-disc set to another dimension. –Donald Liebenson

# Episodes include: Where Is Everybody?, One for the Angels, Mr. Denton on Doomsday, Sixteen Millimeter Shrine, Walking Distance, Escape Clause, The Lonely, Time Enough at Last, Perchance to Dream, Judgment Night, And When the Sky Was Opened, What You Need, The Four of Us Are Dying, Third from the Sun, I Shot an Arrow into the Air, The Hitch-Hiker, The Fever, The Last Flight, The Purple Testament, Elegy, Mirror Image, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, A World of Difference, Long Live Walter Jameson, People Are Alike All Over, Execution, The Big Tall Wish, A Nice Place to Visit, Nightmare as a Child, A Stop at Willoughby, The Chaser, A Passage for Trumpet, Mr. Bevis, The After Hours, The Mighty Casey, A World of His Own
# Remastered from new high-definition film transfers using the original camera negatives and magnetic soundtracks
# Audio commentaries by Earl Holliman, Martin Landau, Rod Taylor, Martin Milner, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Post and William Self
# Vintage audio recollections with Burgess Meredith, Douglas Heyes, Richard L. Bare, Buck Houghton, Anne Francis and Richard Matheson
# Rod Serling audio lectures from Sherwood Oaks College
# Isolated music scores featuring the legendary Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith and more
# Rod Serling promos for “Next Week’s” show
# Original unaired pilot version of “Where Is Everybody?” with Rod Serling’s network pitch
# Rare Rod Serling blooper

The Twilight Zone - Season 1 (The Definitive Edition)

Product Description:

The complete first season of Rod Serling’s classic, groundbreaking series exploring the fantastic and the frightening.

“Now you see it. You’re amazed. You can’t believe it. Your eyes open wider. It’s horrible, but you can’t look away. There’s no chance for you. No escape. You’re helpless, helpless. There’s just one chance, if you can scream. Throw your arms across your eyes and scream, scream for your life!” And scream Fay Wray does most famously in this monster classic, one of the greatest adventure films of all time, which even in an era of computer-generated wizardry remains a marvel of stop-motion animation. Robert Armstrong stars as famed adventurer Carl Denham, who is leading a “crazy voyage” to a mysterious, uncharted island to photograph “something monstrous … neither beast nor man.” Also aboard is waif Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) and Bruce Cabot as big lug John Driscoll, the ship’s first mate. King Kong’s first half-hour is steady going, with engagingly corny dialogue (”Some big, hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and bang, he cracks up and goes sappy”) and ominous portent that sets the stage for the horror to come. Once our heroes reach Skull Island, the movie comes to roaring, chest-thumping, T. rex-slamming, snake-throttling, pterodactyl-tearing, native-stomping life. King Kong was ranked by the American Film Institute as among the 50 best films of the 20th century. Kong making his last stand atop the Empire State Building is one of the movies’ most indelible and iconic images. –Donald Liebenson

More King Kong 1933

DVD features
Not surprisingly, the eighth wonder of the world’s DVD treatment is nothing short of spectacular. The newly restored, digitally mastered print of the 1933 version of King Kong is sharp, well balanced, and given that this film is seventy years old, has very few scratches or blemishes. The restoration is nothing short of amazing. What may frustrate some is the audio. Though crystal clear, it is still in 2.0 Mono. The soundtrack on Kong is such an integral part of the film you really wished they could have pulled it out to at least 2.0 Surround; but this is a minor criticism. The bulk of the commentary track is by visual effects veterans Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston joyfully discussing the special effects of the film and discussing why King Kong is such a favorite and important film to the community of visual effects artists. Spliced between their commentaries are colorful and humorous anecdotes from director from Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray. The two documentaries on disc two run over three and half hours long. I Am Kong! The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper is an engaging documentary on the renegade, Hemingway-like director. It is fascinating to learn that Cooper was every bit the adventurer that the fictional director Carl Denham in King Kong was in the film. RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World is a two and a half hour documentary broken into 7 parts: “The Origins of King Kong,” “Willis O’Brien and Creation,” “Cameras Roll on Kong,” “The Eighth Wonder,” “A Milestone in Visual Effects,” “Passion, Sound and Fury,” “The Mystery of the Lost Spider Pit Sequence,” and “King Kong’s Legacy.” Also included is complete footage of the legendary “The Lost Spider Pit Sequence.” Presenting the segments are various film historians and filmmakers including Rudy Behlmer, Cooper biographer Mark Cotta Vaz, the Chiodo Brothers (of Team America: World Police special effects fame), and directors John Landis and Peter Jackson. Here you will learn everything you would ever want to know about the making and importance of King Kong, including that the producer/director team of Cooper and Schoedsack played the pilots who shoot Kong off the Empire State Building. The highly anticipated, long-awaited release of King Kong will meet most viewers’ expectations, and exceed everyone’s else. –Rob Bracco

King Kong (Collector’s Edition)

Audio Commentary:Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston with Merian C. Cooper, and Fay Wray
Documentaries:RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World (7-Part Documentary) 1. The Origins of King Kong, 2. Willis O’Brien and Creation, 3. The Filming of King Kong, 4. The Visual Effects of King Kong, 5. The Sound and Music of King Kong, 6. The Mystery of the Lost Spider Pit Sequence, 7. The Legacy of King Kong. Plus, I’m Kong: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper (2005 TCM documentary) and Hollywood The Golden Years: The RKO Story- Birth of a Titan (1987 BBC documentary).
Other:Creation Test Footage with Optional Commentary by Ray Harryhausen
Theatrical Trailer:Merian C. Cooper Trailer Gallery

Now this is a Horror Movie. At least one with some creativity! If you have not seen this yet, do yourself a favor and order it as soon as you can.

I ordered Dead Alive a few weeks ago because a friend recommended it. For some reason it was not readily available at my local shop so I ordered it online. Well worth it.

Throw out all your preconceptions about the limits of horror! A new standard has been set with Dead Alive - The Mother of All Horror Films.

On a quiet street, in a small town, pure evil has come to stay. Lionel, an innocent young man, is forced to care for his domineering mother and finds the task a whole lot more demanding after she’s bitten by the cursed Sumatran rat monkey. Passing the point of death, Lionel’s mother sucks friends and family into her gruesome existence among the living dead and Lionel is sent spiraling into a ghoulish nightmare.

now a crazed zombie, she soon infects enough people to make it difficult for Lionel, still the faithful son, to keep the neighbors from suspecting that something is terribly wrong.

Dead Alive is dripping with state-of-the-art special effects that feature mutilations, rock ‘n roll dismemberments and household appliances, combining into the most bizarre ending ever filmed.

In case you forgot, Peter Jackson is also the director of The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers, and The Lord of the Rings - Return Of The King.

I highly recommend Dead Alive for the gore loving splatter fiends!

Tagline: A Tale Of Murder, Mayhem and Revenge
Plot Synopsis: Sequel to ‘House of 1000 Corpses’ is set some months later with the Texas State Police making a full-scale attack against the murderous Firefly family residence for the 1,000+ murders and disappearances of the past several years. But three of the family members escape, including Otis, Baby Firefly and Baby’s father Captain Spaulding. The evil trio go on a road trip, leaving dozens of mangled bodies in their wake. Evading a massive Texas Rangers dragnet as well as a group of equally murderous bounty hunters led by Ken Dwyer (the brother of a policeman Mamma Firefly killed in ‘House of…’) who’s obsessed with finding the deadly killers, the surviving Firefly clan gather at a run-down amusement park owned by Captain Spaulding’s half-brother, Charlie Altamont, whom offers them shelter and a new base of operations for their killing spree as Sheriff Dwyer, the Texas Rangers, the FBI and others slowly close in.

Actors: Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon, William Forsythe, Ken Foree, See more
Directors: Rob Zombie
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Widescreen, Ntsc

I try to follow shark attacks due to my infatuation with Jaws and sea-horror.

And it has been a long time since the shark attack of 2004. But it has happened again, this time a girl.

From NY Daily News

‘Jaws’ horror kills girl
Shark bites off her leg near Florida.

A 14-year-old girl paddling on a Boogie board met a gruesome end yesterday when a bloodthirsty 11-foot shark viciously tore off her leg in waters off a crowded Florida beach.

Despite the heroic efforts of a surfer who risked his life to pull the maimed teen to shore, she later died - becoming the first person killed by a shark in the U.S. this year.

The terrifying incident happened on the first weekend of summer - and the 30th anniversary of the release of the movie “Jaws” - as the girl and a pal enjoyed the surf 200 yards from a coastal campground on Florida’s Panhandle.

“They saw a dark shape in the water,” Walton County Sheriff’s Department Lt. Frank Owens told the Daily News.

“Then one girl saw her friend get pulled under the water. … The shark was feeding on a large school of fish at the time.”

Ouch. Just another victim. Why do people not take the sea/ocean seriously? Do they not think about all the sea creatures who inhabit the waters?

Knocked from her board, the girl, who was visiting the Sunshine State from Gonzales, La., thrashed under the water with the predator.

Her friend, also 14, started paddling furiously toward shore to get help.

“A surfer nearby saw the attack and - with considerable danger to himself - came over with the shark right there and grabbed the girl,” Owens said.

“He couldn’t have been braver,” he added. Despite the tragic outcome, “this man could be called a hero.”

The names of the victim, who was pronounced dead at a local hospital, her friend and the surfer were not immediately released by police.

It was not clear what type of shark attacked the girl, and authorities brought in an expert to try to identify the killer’s species.

“The girl was some distance from the shore,” said Stan Kirkland, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “I don’t think anyone got a good view of the shark.”

The attack was believed to be the first in the U.S. this year and led to the closing of about 20 miles of beaches in Walton County, Coast Guard officials said.

“I didn’t know that when I was told to get out it was a shark,” said Robert Goodwin, 12, of St. Louis. “I was like, what? Wow, that’s not cool.”

Thirty shark attacks were reported in the U.S. last year. One, off Hawaii, was fatal. Worldwide, there were 61 attacks, including seven that were fatal, last year.

The Florida attack comes just two weeks after a surfer off the Jersey Shore was bitten on the foot.

Yesterday’s victim and her friend were visiting relatives in Destin, a town of more than 11,000 people on the Gulf of Mexico, and enjoying the beach at the Camping on the Gulf Holiday Travel Park. The manager of the park declined to comment.

Just before the tragedy, the girls paddled past deep water and stopped at a sandbar, where the warm surf was only a few feet deep, a Walton County official said.

Residents of the popular tourist destination, crowded with sun-lovers on a day with temperatures in the upper 80s, were stunned by the shark attack, which Owens said was the first in the county in decades.

Though Florida only had 12 shark attacks off its coast last year, it had the largest number of documented shark attacks worldwide in 2003, with 30, according to the International Shark Attack File, a group at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Add another ‘Jaws’ attack to the records. As long as people inhabit the shore lines and beach fronts and water ways, there will be attacks.