Movie Review: Spider Baby (1968, Blu-ray/DVD combo)

  The credits dub this “the maddest story ever told”, a promise that's well on the way to being fulfilled in the opening scene alone, when Virginia traps and kills a hapless deliveryman in her makeshift web. She's one of three siblings who suffer from a genetic disorder that causes them to regress back to childhood, while retaining the physical strength and sexual maturity of adults.

 So many directors got their start working for Roger Corman and Jack Hill was one of them. Deemed by Quentin Tarantino as "The Howard Hawks of exploitation filmmaking".  He has been mostly known for having directed Pam Grier in two revolutionary for their times pictures black exploitation pictures Coffy & Foxy Brown.   He would then go on to work with Pam twice more in the two rather infamous shot in the Philippines women in prison films for Roger Corman. Those flicks were the overrated The Big Doll House and the underrated Big Bird Cage. Hill also had a strong working relationship with the great Sid Haig who thanks to House of 1000 and Devils Rejects has had a major career revival.

Movie Review: Mimesis: Night of the Living Dead (2012)

Reviewed by John Beutler

I have to admit, for a small, under-the-radar release...as well as always being on the lookout for a fresh take on the well-worn 'living dead' genre...I was genuinely excited about this. The trailer seems to promise so much: A group of devoted and knowledgeable horror film fans, having just run themselves through the crazed gauntlet of a recent horror film convention (...this reviewer does that very thing, every year...and absolutely loves it, even at a relatively seasoned age...), get waywardly invited to an isolated farmhouse in the backwoods, for a horror based, free-for-all party. At a certain point, they all 'pass out'...and inexplicably awaken in strangely familiar surroundings, wearing strangely familiar clothing...specifically, in...What?? A certain cemetery, and later, in a certain isolated farmhouse...progressively surrounded by flesh-eating zombies??

Movie Review: I Heart Monster Movies (2012)

Reviewed by: Rob Sibley

“I Heart Monster Movies” is a seventy five minute documentary which is a true love letter to the horror genre and culture. Let's start off, before I popped the DVD into my player I quickly read the synopsis and took a look at the images on the back cover. On the back cover is Sid Haig, Tom Savini and other horror greats. So I figured “Oh boy, seventy five minutes of stories I've heard before.” Well I was wrong... despite the short running time they pack a lot of great stuff into this documentary. Now if you're reading this, you are a horror fan. So you know that we horror fans have a bad rap with the “mainstream”. Not always, since horror these days is big business. Back in the day, films like Hostel and The Saw series would have played at the drive-ins and would have gotten slapped with NC-17's. Now  torture is mainstream and people pay a lot to watch it. Why? That's another discussion for another time.

Movie Review: The Big Bird Cage (1972)

Directed by Jack Hill
Starring Pam Grier, Anitra Ford and Sid Haig

The Big Bird Cage was the third “Women in Prison” movie produced by B-movie king Roger Corman in a short two year span during the early 70's, along with The Big Doll House and Women in Cages. Sensing the genre was becoming a bit predictable, Corman hired director Jack Hill to inject a fresh approach to this one, and by adding a heavy dose of humor and parody what he came up with is perhaps one of the best exploitation films of its time.

Buy The Big Bird Cage on DVD

Movie Review: Haunted Casino (2009)

I don’t know where you live, but I live in Arizona (for the next few days). In Arizona there are a ton of casinos. Some of these casinos are pretty small and a little creepy. These are the kinds of places where you can see eighty year old women smoking out of a tracheotomy, drunken slobs going broke on the penny slot machine and a buffet that makes public school lunches look like five star meals. If you have any of these little places around you it is an interesting, and depressing, cross section of humanity that owes it’s soul to the dark gods of chance. Charles Band’s Haunted Casino reminded me of these hole in the wall establishments… except it sucked a whole lot worse.

Buy Haunted Casino or Dead Man's Hand - Casino of the Damned, they're the same damn movie.