An off-the-wall alien abduction saga that skewers mankind’s fundamental behavioral and belief systems, Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To never quite lives up to its bravura opening, in which detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) investigates a series of random slayings perpetrated by ordinary people (including a young Andy Kaufman as a crazed cop) who…

Fred Walton’s urban legend-inspired When a Stranger Calls began life as a short film, only to be expanded past the twenty-minute mark once Halloween unearthed a box-office market for serial killer thrillers. The problem with such a profit-driven plan, however, was that Walton’s short – which functions as the feature film’s famous first segment, in…

Robert A. Heinlein may have written The Puppet Masters five years before 1956’s classic Cold War allegory Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that does little to diminish the been-there, done-that vibe of Stuart Orme’s 1994 adaptation of Heinlein’s novel, about a secret government agency’s efforts to combat slug-like aliens who control humans by latching…

It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive finishes the series’ natural allegorical evolution, finally turning the aberrant “It” tykes into a nationwide scourge that – after an opening court room scene presided over by Days of Our Lives paterfamilias Macdonald Carey regarding the “humanity” of small-time actor Stephen Jarvis’ (Michael Moriarty) offspring – is dealt…

With It Lives Again, Larry Cohen shifts his horror series’ focus from the realm of the personal to that of the communal, positing a situation in which the childbirth aberration suffered by It’s Alive’s Davis family has mutated into a bourgeoning epidemic. A few years after his own infant ordeal, notorious monster daddy Frank Davis…

Its title a nod to Dr. Frankenstein’s triumphant cry in James Whale’s 1931 classic, Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive may be the most discomforting filmic depiction of childbirth anxiety, parental responsibility and unconditional love I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the all-time underrated horror movies, a deeply terrifying portrait of child-parent relationships and intolerant fears…

Ugly stereotypes, anorexic socio-political allegory, scant scares, and Bill Pullman – that’s The Serpent and the Rainbow in a nutshell. Based on Wade Davis’ novel, Wes Craven’s lame documentary-flavored horror story follows anthropologist Dennis Alan (Pullman) as he searches revolutionary Haiti for a mystery drug that reportedly raises the dead. With the help of a…

A lyrical portrait of aimless youth painted with touches of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is cold and uninvolving, which isn’t to say that it’s wholly unsuccessful. Rather, if one can look past the filmmaker’s affected Bard adaptation – which has the raggedy, improvisational feel of a community theater production…