It’s Halloween, and that means it’s time to trick-or-treat or attend costume parties or seek out a local haunted house.  But for me, it’s hard to find a better haunted house than my plasma TV.

I was a bit of a fraidy-cat when I was a kid.  I used to sleepwalk after seeing scary movies, or if that didn’t happen, I would awake-walk into my parents’ room for a hug from Mom.   In order to confront that embarrassing—if amusing—childhood demon, I became a bit of a horror buff.  Hopefully my pain is your gain.

Five Movies to Watch This Halloween

“Return of the Living Dead” (1985)
In this “cult classic,” a group of punk rock-loving teens venture out to pick up a friend from his job at a medical supply shop in Louisville, Kentucky.  When a foreman opens up a military drum that was accidentally sent to the shop—which, oh-by-the-way has an UNDEAD BODY IN IT!!—all zombie-hell breaks loose.

The film is genuinely funny, has a couple of good scares, and a rockin’ soundtrack, but it also injected life into the genre because all the zombies run (fast!) and most of them talk.  Like this one:

Doesn’t she look familiar?  Check out this zombie from “The Walking Dead.”

The B-plot, featuring an Army Colonel on a mysterious, tedious, yet seemingly extremely important mission, is tied up brilliantly in the frightening, apocalyptic conclusion.

But what really puts this film over the top is that it features the best zombie of all time, Tarman.  Gruesome, evil, and with just the right amount of camp, the zombie that first exclaimed “BRRAAAAAIIIIINNNNSS!!” before chowing down on the cerebral cortex of some young punk deserves a place in cinematic lore. (more…)

What is horror?

The word comes down to us from the Old Roman, horrere, which means literally “to stand on end” (as in hair) or “to shiver,” whether from fear or cold – Ovid refers to the “chill-bearing breath” of the North Wind (Metamorphosis, I.65).

Halloween is a unique holiday, marked for the celebration of the chill bearing, when demons and witches are allowed to come out to play and scare the bejezzus out of us – or at least, that’s how it used to be.

Over the last decade or so, Halloween has become less about creep and more about camp; Dracula and Frankenstein costumes replaced by Octomom and Obama masks (OK, those are more scary). What I want to do here is help those who would like go old school this year, and have a truly frightful All Hallows’ Eve.

(First suggestion – avoid bars. Like St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s, Halloween brings out the amateur drinkers, a more loathsome species than any undead thing you may encounter. No, Halloween is best spent alone with someone special to snack on in the dark, with something scary to read, listen to, or watch.) (more…)

Liam Neeson is officially a full-fledged action star. The Irish-born actor has often played heroes, whether it was Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Schindler’s List, the wise Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace or determined sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in 2005’s biopic Kinsey, Neeson has always had a knack for playing the earnest-but-flawed good guy. In his new movie Taken (Fox), writer/producer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel have turned him into a Dad with the “mad skills” of a super-spy – think Mike Brady crossed with Jason Bourne.

The result is a well-reviewed (56% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) action film that will help to satisfy blockbuster-hungry audiences waiting for Warner Bros’ Watchmen (due March 6). Taken has scored big on its opening weekend. After grabbing an estimated $9.4M, the movie surged on Saturday to $11.62M (up almost 24% from opening day) and, despite today’s Super Bowl, the film could reach $24.62M according to studio estimates. That will be more than enough to win the Super Bowl 3-day, and positive word-of-mouth could get this one into the $70M-$75M range domestic.

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