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March 2011

EXCLUSIVE: Code Red’s Nightmare 2-Disc Set Finally

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Code Red received quite a bashing from the genre DVD community for taking their own sweet time assembling a special edition of Nightmare (1981). Romano Scavolini’s film is a virtual camera lens inside the mind of a sweaty, mouth-foaming psychotic, and required special handling to bring this 2-Disc DVD to fruition. July 5th will see the sleazy slasher finally released onto the streets. Take a squiz at the details Code Red exclusively shared with Retro Slashers.

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Interview: Filming Halloween 5’s Laundry Chute Sequence With DP Rob Draper, ACS

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Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers has long since divided fans of the series, with some feeling that the movie failed to live up to the comeback of The Return of Michael Myers and others appreciating the European feel that Swiss filmmaker Dominique Othenin-Girard brought to the picture. Arguably the movie’s stand-out moment is the sequence in which the young heroine (played by eleven-year old Danielle Harris) is trapped inside a laundry chute, as Michael repeatedly stabs his knife through the side. The scene would be the result of hard work and extensive preparation between Othenin-Girard and his director of photography, Robert Draper, who would later shoot the cult horror flicks Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and Dr. Giggles.

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Blue Underground to Release Torso on Blu-ray

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Along with Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava, Sergio Martino was one of the most successful Italian filmmakers working in the giallo genre during the 1970s. Among his most acclaimed work were La coda dello scorpione (The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) and l tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), yet perhaps his most overlooked was his 1973 thriller I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (Carnal Violence). More commonly known under its alternative title Torso, the movie is one of Martino’s more explicit features, which included a significant amount of nudity. The film’s climax – in which heroine Suzy Kendall is chased around the house by a masked killer – could be considered an influence on the subsequent slasher cycle.

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The Prowler’s Farley Granger R.I.P.

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It is a common method for ageing actors whose glory days are long behind them to accept roles in low budget horror movies in order to remain in the public spotlight. The slasher genre saw such esteemed screen legends as Jack Palance, Glenn Ford and Donald Pleasence appearing in a variety of pictures during the cycle’s heyday. Farley Granger, perhaps most famous for his work with Alfred Hitchcock on the classics Rope and Strangers on a Train, followed major success both on screen and Broadway with the Italian thriller La polizia chiede aiuto (What Have They Done to Your Daughters?), before taking one of the lead roles in Joseph Zito’s 1981 slasher The Prowler.

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By Sword, By Pick, By Axe: The Making of The Mutilator

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Critics may scoff and most film fans may turn their noses up at them, but the slasher genre is the perfect training ground for a young, wannabe filmmaker. With an almost non-existent budget, a simple premise, aided by a likeable cast and some inventive special effects, can result in a modest performance at the box office. It is the one genre that was at its most lucrative outside of the studio system; Friday the 13th was produced without the assistance of Paramount Pictures, who later purchased the film and ran an extensive publicity campaign, and John Carpenter’s independent hit Halloween would inspire a generation of filmmakers to shoot their own cheap thrillers.

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Writer Calls on Horror Fans to Boycott Leisure Books

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When I wrote about the demise of Leisure’s mass market paperback line in favor of e-books, I had no idea the terrible drama playing out behind the scenes.  According to genre author Brian Keene, Dorchester/Leisure Books stopped paying royalties owed to their writers back in late 2009.  Then, with the payment issues still unresolved, Dorchester suddenly announced they were switching to e-books format and shutting down the paperback brands.  Now, with many of their former and current writers suffering because of missed payments and outright stealing of books the company no longer have rights to, Brian Keene is asking for all horror fans to boycott Dorchester/Leisure Books.

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Coppola’s Dementia 13 Making Its Way to Blu-ray

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Over the last couple of years there have been countless Roger Corman productions that have made their way to Blu-ray and now the latest to be upgraded is Francis Ford Coppola’s commercial debut Dementia 13. Having completed work on a picture entitled The Young Racers in Ireland, Corman discovered that he still had some of his budget remaining and so offered Coppola the chance to direct a quick thriller using actors and props from the production, a common method for Corman. Considered by some to be a prototype for the slasher cycle that would follow over a decade later, Dementia 13 slipped into obscurity for many years before being rediscovered on home video.

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Murder on Film? The Story of Snuff

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Although they had courted controversy throughout the latter half of the 1960s with a string of sexploitation pictures that became regular attractions around Times Square, little did Michael and Roberta Findlay know that their legacy would be that of a supposed snuff film. Despite the revelation at the end of the movie that fooled audiences into believing the events to be real, the filmmakers themselves played no part in this, nor the shameless marketing that further fuelled the rumours that an actress in the movie had in fact been murdered in front of the camera. But what exactly is a ‘snuff’ film? One dictionary defines it as ‘a pornographic movie of an actual murder.’

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Small Screen Slashers – Trapped

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The same year that he fought Yul Brynner to the death in the science fiction classic Westworld, thirty-two year old James Brolin was forced to flee for his life through a closed department store from vicious guard dogs. Produced by Universal TV and debuting on ABC in 1973, Trapped would be overshadowed by Brolin’s big screen success and would remain overlooked and underappreciated, a fate many made-for-television films would suffer. A simple premise with few locations and characters, Trapped would make full use of its claustrophobic environment, whilst also fuelling the same kind of fear of dogs that Cujo would conjure up a decade later.

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Stan Winston and the Slasher Film

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In the otherwise excellent book The Winston Effect: The Art and History of Stan Winston Studio, aside from a brief mention of the Friday the 13th sequels Stan Winston’s early work in the slasher genre was strangely omitted. This dismissal was not only reserved for the slice ‘n’ dice cycle, however, as both the overlooked splatter classic Mansion of the Doomed and the atmospheric thriller Dead & Buried were also overlooked. There was a section set aside from many of his earlier projects, ranging from the made-for-TV movie Gargoyles to the Star Wars Holiday Special, yet the first genre picture to receive significant page space was James Cameron’s sci-fi slasher The Terminator.

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