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Imagine this daunting task—you’re a young on-the-rise Australian filmmaker & devoted Hitchcock protégé with a handful of successful low-budget thrillers under your belt and you’re eagerly waiting a big break in Hollywood. You’re paired up with an actor-turned-screenwriter who only had a few modestly successful horror films on his resume. And then you’re asked to make a sequel to one of the most influential films of all time from a director you spent your entire life idolizing. That’s the position Richard Franklin was put in when he was asked to helm Psycho II for Universal Pictures in 1982 and, thankfully, he rose to the challenge and met it with full confidence, successfully re-introducing Norman Bates to a whole new generation of film lovers.

Ignoring the radical and bizarre direction that Robert Bloch’s sequel book took, writer Tom Holland (who at the time had penned Class of 1984, The Beast Within, and The Initiation Of Sarah) opted instead to tell a brand new story, picking up 22 years after the events of the first Psycho film. The film had ended with Norman Bates being arrested after a string of murders at the Bates Motel which he committed as his alternate personality, his crazed, wild-eyed mother. Psycho II actually opens with the shower scene since this moment from the original and the character of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) play so heavily into the plot of the sequel. After a brief credit montage, we’re in the court room where Norman Bates is declared to be restored to sanity and is officially set free, much to the dismay of Lila Loomis aka Lila Crane, Marion’s sister, once again reprised by actress Vera Miles. Despite her protests and her signed petition, Norman walks out of the courthouse a free man, is escorted by his doctor, Bill Raymond (Robert Loggia) back to his house and his motel, and is set up with a job at the local diner.

It’s always been interesting to follow the cinematic career of Bill Murray, an actor and entertainer who, during the ‘80s, could do no wrong when it came to his comedic performances. Even during that period you could start to see his desire to make odd and unique film choices—The Razor’s Edge and Quick Change, for example—and those choices would eventually lay the foundation for the types of roles Murray would go on to play pretty much exclusively now. But there was one last great one-two comedic hurrah from Murray in the early ‘90s with the back-to-back films What About Bob? and Groundhog Day.

What About Bob? came first in 1991 and it stars Murray as a completely multi-phobic personality named Bob Wiley, a man incapable of doing even the smallest of tasks without completely panicking. Deep down, he’s a good-hearted person with the desire to do the right thing; he’s just petrified of everything and everyone around him. Hence, he works from his apartment by day, uses tissues to open doors or shake hands, and would opt to climb 44 flights of stairs rather than be confined in a claustrophobic setting like an elevator. He also starts off each day by repeating the phrase “I feel good, I feel great, I feel wonderful,” over and over again and the one and only companion he converses with is his pet goldfish, Gil. After a strong recommendation from a previous doctor, Bob meets up with Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss), a stern, serious, and fairly egotistical psychiatrist hot on the heels of a successful new book and on the cusp of superstardom via an upcoming appearance on Good Morning America.

After a long and rich 50-year history in the pages of Marvel Comics, The Incredible Hulk marks the second cinematic interpretation of the fan favorite titanic superhero. Abandoning all of what was established in Ang Lee’s 2003 version of Hulk, this version takes more of a cue from the original Incredible Hulk TV series of the late ’70s and is presented as a “reboot” rather than a sequel. Instead of spending an hour with exposition and showing a drawn out “origin” story like the other movie did (and as most superhero movies in general do these days), this version manages to encapsulate the birth of Bruce Banner’s alter ego in the span of a few minutes during a clever opening credits montage. Visually, it’s exactly what most casual fans of the TV show remember; Bruce is strapped down to a chair, the circular light beam from a giant machine shines down on his forehead and during his experimentation with gamma radiation he accidently over-exposes himself which turns him into the angry green goliath. As the credits unfold, Banner (Edward Norton) as the Hulk inadvertently hurts the love of his life, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) and her father General ‘Thunderball’ Ross (William Hurt). And much like the TV series, Banner is then on the run and in hiding by the second scene of the movie, desperately trying to come to terms with his anger, find a cure, and keep the beast at bay.

When we find Bruce, he’s in Brazil working at a bottle plant factory by day and meeting with a yoga guru by night trying to learn how to control his inner hostilities. Meanwhile, he’s communicating with a mysterious scientist simply known only as Mr. Blue via the Internet and exchanging theories and notes regarding his condition. Ever since the incident we witnessed during the opening credits, General Ross has been on the hunt for Banner and the Hulk, and when Bruce accidently pokes his finger at work and inadvertently sheds a drop of his blood into one of the soda bottles headed for America, it eventually reveals his whereabouts. General Ross puts together a military team fronted by Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) to bring in Banner.

Even if you’re a casual film fan, you must have a general knowledge of who Roger Corman is and how important he’s been to the movie industry. You need look no further than the impressive roaster of names that speak about the prolific filmmaker in the documentary Corman’s World: Exploits Of A Hollywood Rebel. Jack Nicholson. Peter Fonda. Martin Scorsese. Peter Bogdanovich. Joe Dante. Ron Howard. Robert DeNiro. Bruce Dern. Dick Miller. William Shatner. And so on and so forth. Corman is responsible for helping to launch the careers of every one of those names I mentioned above and then some! So it’s somewhat of a surprise that a documentary of this type honoring the man and his large body of work has taken this long to come into existence.

Not that Corman hasn’t gotten due credit and praise in the form of supplemental material before. Over the course of the last year, Shout! Factory obtained the license for dozens of his famous films and has been putting out great special edition DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s with extensive retrospective documentaries covering the making of each of those individual movies. There was also the fantastic documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed released last year from filmmaker Mark Hartley (who also did Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation) which had a large segment talking about the low-budget “women in cages” movies that Corman produced in the Philippines, which also launched the acting career of Pam Grier. But as much as I thought I knew about Corman from the above mentioned sources, there was still plenty I learned from Corman’s World.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wished for a proper Punisher movie. As a diehard comic book reader and collector, there was a point where I discovered the idea of vigilantism and The Punisher immediately became my favorite superhero (actually, more like an anti-hero and minus the “super” part since he has no legitimate powers other than being a complete and total badass). With over 30-some-odd years of history and through various directions that comic creators have taken the character, it would seem that there are plenty of great stories to cull from in order to make a solid movie adaptation. But for whatever reason, while all the Punisher movies have incorporated different aspects of the original source material, none of the cinematic translations have been 100 percent successful, either financially at the box office or critically among both reviewers and fans. However, if you’re well-versed in the run by writer Garth Ennis over the course of the last decade or so, then Punisher: War Zone comes pretty darn close to capturing the over-the-top gory lunacy of Ennis’s books.

The movie wastes little time in getting right into the violent action. After a brief title sequence, the film opens at a grand dinner gala with several heads of the mob congregating to discuss business and celebrate with Uncle G, the Godfather-esque elder of the East Coast mafia. But their dinner is cut abruptly short when the Punisher drops in and literally slaughters just about all 30 of these bad guys in the span of a few short minutes. The action is brutal, highly stylized, fast in pace, and so over the top that you won’t be able to process everything going on with just one viewing. The Punisher manages to cut a head off, break a neck, lodge his hunter knife into a skull, kick a chair leg into the eye of a thug, then hang upside down from the chandelier where he unloads a never-ending spray of bullets from his machine guns into whomever is left in the room, as well as anyone else stupid enough to enter it. Did I mention this is all just in the first 10 minutes?

It’s interesting to revisit Chuck Russell’s 1994 adaptation of The Mask, now almost 20 some-odd years later knowing that this was the second of three Jim Carrey movies (the other two being Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb & Dumber) that would catapult the funnyman into super stardom. Also, considering that this is a far cry from the original comic book version of the character in which the Mask was conceived as a darker and more violent vigilante, who would’ve thought that when Dark Horse Comics first debuted the character he’d eventually spawn an animated series and kid friendly sequel?! But I digress…

In the movie, Jim Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, a mild-mannered, overly nice and yet kind-of nerdy bank teller who, for the most part, can’t catch a break anywhere in his personal life. His female co-workers don’t want to date him (and in fact, take advantage of his niceness); his boss is always riding him (despite him being a model employee), and he’s even getting ripped off by his local mechanics. His best friend Charlie (the late Richard Jeni) believes in him, though, and tries to boost his confidence by bringing him out to the hot new club in Edge City, the Coco Bongo. Meanwhile, gangster (and Coco Bongo manager) Dorian Tyrell (Peter Greene) is plotting the hostile takeover of city turf from mob boss Niko once he and his crew have established their cred by pulling off a risky bank robbery.

Taking a cue from the infamous Twilight Zone episode “Talking Tina,” as well as the Zuni doll segment from Trilogy Of Terror, director (and writer) Tom Holland was not only able to craft a “killer doll” movie rich with mythology that is both suspenseful & terrifying, but also arguably the best of this particular sub-genre in horror. And Child’s Play wastes no time as it opens in the middle of a police pursuit with Detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon) hot on the trail of Charles Lee Ray (Brad Douriff), the notorious serial killer known as the Lakeshore Strangler who has just been ditched & abandoned mid-robbery by his accomplice Eddie Caputo (Neil Giuntoli). The chase ends in a local toy store where, after a brief gun fight, Ray is mortally wounded. But before he dies, he performs a voodoo ceremony to transfer his soul into that of a Good Guy talking doll. Does the mumbo-jumbo spell actually work?

Karen Barkley (Catherine Hicks) is a recently single mother who wants nothing more than to provide for her 6-year-old son Andy. And Andy wants nothing more than to get a Good Guy doll for his birthday. When a peddler out behind the store where Karen works offers to sell her a Good Guy doll for $30 bucks over the normally excessive $100 dollar retail charge, she takes advantage so she can give her son the gift she knows he so desperately wants. All seems fine at first and Andy now has a “best friend to the end”. But then, bad things start happening around Andy.

As someone who manages the “cult” section in our Hollywood location, I pride myself on both the knowledge I have of these films, as well as the immaculate organization I strive to maintain in all of the sub-sections within “cult”. (Psst… they’re alphabetized!) But of all those sub-categories, the one I know the least about is “Poliziotteschi”. Simply put, these films are a sub-genre of Italian crime and action movies that emphasize the brutal and over-the-top violence; much in the same way that “giallo” films are a series of Italian horror murder/mysteries with similar aesthetics. So I’ve always wanted to delve in and see what these “Poliziotteschi” movies were all about.

With a kick-ass title like Live Like A Cop Die Like A Man, this seemed like the ideal candidate as an introduction; after all, it carries a tremendous amount of horror pedigree with it. It was directed by Ruggero Deodato, most well known for his controversial horror classic Cannibal Holocaust. It stars Marc Porel who appeared in Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling and The Psychic, as well as Ray Lovelock who also worked with Fulci in Murder Rock and appeared in the Spanish zombie flick Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. The screenplay was written by Fernando Di Leo who is well known for penning the scripts for a chunk of these “Poliziottechi” films. And then when my buddy Zane Grant (a fellow “giallo” enthusiast) started explaining to me the plot (and I use that term lightly) of this movie, I honestly couldn’t believe what he was telling me could possibly be true. I had to see this for myself. And sure enough, it’s as insane as he’d described.

Bold as it is to say, if you’re a horror fan and you appreciate the style of teen comedies that were often made in the ‘80s, then I think Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home is pretty much the most romantic movie ever made. What follows is my evidence to support this statement.

Jon Cryer (Pretty in Pink’s Duckie, as most of you know him) plays 16-year-old Morgan Stewart, a sweet prankster currently serving time at his 10th prep school who just also happens to be a huge horror fanatic. The opening shot of the movie starts out on a close-up of his vintage theatrical one-sheet poster for Lucio Fulci’s Zombi and then pulls out and pans across his room to reveal a barrage of masks, a mechanic moving severed hand, and a slew of posters ranging from Dawn of the Dead to Tales of Terror to The Exorcist. He ends up meeting the girl of his dreams, Emily, (Viveka Davis) while waiting in line at a mall to get George A. Romero’s autograph. She insists on being called “Em,” “just like in Dial M for Murder, the only film Hitchcock ever did in 3D.” Their first date is to see a late night screening of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Hell, even Em’s parents are cool and give her crap over her choice of a date movie, "when William Castle’s Strait Jacket is playing at the Inner Circle!" (And clearly it’s the better choice.) She convinces Morgan to jump into the shower with her while wearing Halloween masks in a wonderful nod to Psycho, which of course always warms my black and bitter little heart. See? Most romantic movie ever, right? Oh wait; there is a story and a plot here, too!

If you ever sought to find a modern day horror film that both celebrated and homaged the great "slasher" era of the '80s, while simultaneously adding something new, fresh and unique to that particular sub-genre, then you need look no further than Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon.

In the world of the film, our modern day real life boogeymen don’t exist. There’s no Charles Manson or John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer. But the cinematic baddies that we’re all well versed in – Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers – all exist in the world of Behind The Mask. They are in fact folklore. Camp fire tales. Legends. The next great killer to join their ranks, whose name will evoke terror and fear to the small, little town of Glen Echo, will be Leslie Vernon. To document both his training and first onslaught, Vernon (Nathan Baesel) has invited a small crew of college filmmakers, fronted by aspiring journalist Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethels), to join him as he becomes the sure-to-be-legendary masked maniac. The results are both frightening and hilarious.