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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 16 - YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
Mel Brooks loves the movies. All the proof you need is right there in his filmography. Hitchcock, Sci-Fi, Historical Epics, silent films, and (of course) westerns have all been given the...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 17 - THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
An interesting phenomenon occurs when one watches a Horror movie. More so than any other genre, the mind is often required to fill in the blanks. It is well known that the less you show,...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 18 - THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
“Based on a true story” always raises a few red flags when it is claimed of a motion picture. We seem to instinctively react with some degree of skepticism when we read those words....
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 19 - THE OLD DARK HOUSE
James Whale was one of the most prolific and diverse film directors of the 1930’s. He casts such an enormous shadow over that decade, one would think that his storied career lasted many...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 20 - SHAUN OF THE DEAD
If what George Bernard Shaw says is true - that dying is easy, but comedy is hard - Horror/Comedy must be hardest of them all. Most films that label themselves as “Horror/Comedy” are...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 21 - WHITE ZOMBIE
When Victor Halperin’s indie Horror film WHITE ZOMBIE was released in August of 1932 it was a great success. Considered the first feature-length zombie movie, WHTIE ZOMBIE cast a shadow...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 22 - JU-ON: THE GRUDGE
In the earliest part of the 21st century, Japan was a hot-bed of Horror film. Movie after scary movie crossed the Pacific ocean to find eager audiences in the Americas. We watched them...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 23 - FRANKENSTEIN
The February release and instant success of “Dracula” convinced producer Carl Laemmle Jr. to accelerate the production of Universal’s follow-up. Following tests in which star Bela Lugosi and...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 24 - THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE
A team of paranormal investigators venture into the old, abandoned Belasco house for a four-day study. They have been sent there by an eccentric billionaire searching for scientific proof...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 25 - POLTERGEIST
Steven Spielberg always wanted to make a haunted house movie. He wanted to so much that one of the ideas he floated to George Lucas for the follow-up to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was to...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 26 - THE WOLF MAN
As far as the major studios go, Universal is the undisputed king of the monster movies. Throughout the 1930s, the monster movies brought out by the studio dominated the Horror genre -...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 27 - ANGEL HEART
What if we made a movie with a run-down private eye hired by a mysterious stranger? What if we placed the body of the mystery in a location that is totally familiar, yet feels utterly...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 28 - ALIEN
A monster stalks a group of people who are trapped in an enclosed area with limited places to hide and few options of escape. They are killed one by one until only the nubile young hottie...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 29 - THE EVIL DEAD
It used to be that the “B movie”, particularly “B” Horror movies, were a sort of minor leagues for emerging filmmakers. It was an area of film where a director could, on a modest budget, cut...
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 30 - PRINCE OF DARKNESS
The Religious Horror sub-genre rarely works for me. I usually don’t find it credible, much less scary (a strange stance, I know, for someone who loves supernatural Horror, but there it is)....
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Halloween Horror Movies 2013 - Day 31 - HALLOWEEN
Today is the day, and this is the movie for it! The sire and still best of all the slasher films, John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN broke the mold of the psycho-killer movie and remade it in its own...
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Somehow, 3 of my "12 Essentials of Christmas" diaries posted prematurely. I took them down...Consider it a preview, I guess... :-[
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12 Essentials of Christmas - Day 1 - THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
In 1982, Disney had a surprise success with a stop-motion animated short called VINCENT, which was the brainchild of one the many animators on their payroll. This animator had another idea...
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12 Essentials of Christmas - Day 2 - RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER
On Sunday, December 6th of 1964 children across the country settled in around their TV sets to watch a new, eagerly awaited Christmas special. It was a special which told the story of a...
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12 Essentials of Christmas - Day 3 - HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
The idea of the “Christmas redemption” is almost as old as the modern Christmas itself. The most obvious example (and the most often imitated) is A CHRISTMAS CAROL, and though many...
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