By the mid-1980s, gang violence had become a serious problem for American society. With the emergence of the relatively cheap and highly addictive crack cocaine, street gangs were able to turn a tidy profit and become real players in the world of organised crime, leading to the kind of all-out warfare that had middle class white America running for the hills. By 1980, rival gangs the Crips and the Bloods had grown to have an estimated 15,000 members, the bulk of them kids aged between 14 and 24. Forced to defend their suburban territories, drive-by shootings became commonplace as peewee violen ..read more

They say it is better to be left wanting more; as appealing as 'more of the same' may sound following moments of intense exhilaration, it is never quite the same the second time around. This, in a nutshell, describes the numbered sequel, a marketing formula that almost guarantees ticket sales while almost certainly inspiring audience discontent ..read more

The House franchise may fall short of greatness, way short, but no one can deny it as one of the most absurdly eclectic that horror has to offer. It all began rather inconspicuously, Friday the 13th alumni Steve Miner's Fred Dekker penned cult favourite House the rather generic tale of a Vietnam vet turned horror novelist who returns to his boyhood home, only to be confronted by a peculiar dimension of ghouls and ghosts, including a giant, 'Zombie Jason'-style soldier who forces protagonist Roger Cobb into a harrowing journey into his past. Okay, perhaps it wasn’t so generic after all, but whe ..read more

Can Jason Lives, a semi-enforced meta flourish that went against the violent controversy of earlier golden age instalments, really be considered the best of Paramount's irrepressible Friday the 13th series? Most would put it above New Line Cinema's largely misguided efforts, but for all the fandom that the sixth sequel has inspired, just as many gave up on the franchise following 1984's Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, a movie that was meant to put the indomitable Jason Voorhees to bed amid a moral panic that saw Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel lambast the character's influence on modern teenag ..read more

Long before quadrilogies, prequels, reboots and whole cinematic universes, movie trilogies were often the subject of hot debate among movie fans. The likes of Jason Voorhees had already run the sequel concept into the ground by the late 1980s, the Friday the 13th series boasting seven by the decade's end, but threequels were typically the cut-off point, very few making it that far. Back then the same old questions arose. Did you prefer the Lethal Weapon trilogy? The Die Hard Trilogy? The Alien Trilogy? Today those questions are much more complex, movies such as the Alien vs Predator series and ..read more

Some twists are so obvious you don't see them coming, or, in the case of Hospital Massacre, you do see them coming, but by the time that twist arrives you've forgotten all about it thanks to the 80 minutes of unreserved madness that preceded it. Come to think of it, there is no real twist in Hospital Massacre, just a blatantly obvious set-up and a plain-as-day pay-off. There are a plethora of possible culprits, but the face of our semi-masked killer is so visible that it's clearly none of the candidates dangled so clumsily in front of us. It's all so blatant, misguided and ineffective. If you ..read more

Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion. In recent years it has become a billion-dollar industry thanks to the Stranger Things-inspired 80s revival and a seemingly endless train of reboots designed to tap into our affection for bygone eras, but back in 1985 its use was rather less calculated. When director Robert Zemeckis released Back to the Future that same year, thirtysomethings were busy reminiscing about the 1950s, a decade when rock n' roll sparked a rebellious streak in teenagers across America ..read more

A solitary theatrical release in the first week of August would prove a rather memorable one as the ever watchable Richard Dreyfuss and Sheen family offspring Emilio Estevez teamed up for John Badham's charming buddy comedy Stakeout ..read more

Crude, wooden, repetitive, stupefyingly obvious, banal & incoherent were just some of the words used to describe horror maestro George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead back in 1978. Predictably, the film’s excessive gore was a particular point of contention, many unwilling or simply unable to look past the rotten veneer of a concept that spoke to the human condition on a much deeper level ..read more

The rape of our children's minds. I thought that might get your attention, and though that headline may sound like unrestrained hyperbole from a writer of little restraint, it is actually a snippet from a ruthless media campaign designed to criminalise independent filmmakers. I'm talking, of course, about the 'Video Nasty' scandal, a pulpit for moral outrage that played into the hands of populistic, conservative politics ..read more