It’s almost Halloween. While this is wonderful news to someone like me, it’s terrible news for my wife who is once again subjected to a plethora of horror movies in my attempt to show her all of the movies she had been missing out on before she met me. It doesn’t help matters much that I can clearly remembering watching movies like Halloween and The Fog before she was born. Anyway, in order to be a little different, this year’s movie queue has been littered with a lot of new unseen movies, such as The Objective (I’m convinced there was an amazing idea somewhere in that mess), The Strangers (who knew being attacked by three creepy people in masks could be so…dull?) and many others not worth mentioning. It’s been pretty bleak. Just when I was giving up hope, along came a movie that made up for all of the disappointments.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is an excellent example of horror deconstruction in the 21^st century, up there with other recent cinematic examples like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and literary examples like Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror”. When I find myself talking about the film with others, inevitably the Scream trilogy is mentioned by others for comparison. And while it’s easy to lump Wes Craven’s franchise with Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, I’d argue that the former spent more of its energy desperately trying to convince a new generation that horror is, like, cool, whereas the latter simply reminds the rest of us why we loved horror in the first place. (more…)

If I haven’t made it readily apparent, I watched a ton of movies as a child. And by ton I mean billions, quite possibly literally. Growing up in Wisconsin I tended to have a lot of free time. Now, unlike the kids of today I spent most of that free time outside.

I created countless games and would spend hours playing them. One of my personal favorites was a version of baseball involving my basketball hoop and a tennis ball. You see I was always the pitcher and the object was to throw the ball into the square of the backboard for a strike, and if the ball hit the rim that was the equivalent of the batter hitting the ball. Trust me, it totally made sense to me and was a blast to play.

But when I would get tired of playing my own personal version of BASEketball I would bike to my local video store and rent a movie. Now it didn’t take long for me to work my way through the giants of the day and I soon began to search out far riskier fare. As an interesting side note, I know have the odd ability of identifying a good two decades worth of movies solely by their cover art, often times coming up with my own idea of what the movie was about based on these images.

(more…)