Titans Terrors and Toys

Way back in 2001, Japanese horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa released a film called Kairo (a.k.a. Pulse ). An apocalyptic story, Kairo told the tale of a group of Japanese college students who are investigating the death of their friend and its connection to a mysterious Web site that promised the change for the living to communicate with the dead. As the movie unfolds, it turns out that the site is allowing hordes of dead spirits to invade the world of the living, which in turn causes people to either commit suicide or simply vanish, leaving behind nothing but a shadow-shaped arrangements of ash. The heavy-handed message of Kairo was its metaphorical prediction that the Internet would inevitably cause people's sense of community to collapse. This would lead to an epidemic of depression and dispair as more and more individuals become separated from their fellow human beings because of too much technology invading our lives. Well, it's 2015, the Internet is as popular a...

As part of this year's annual release of Christmas ornaments, Hallmark has included an ornament based on the titular monster from the 1987 creature feature Predator . I just picked up one for my own holiday season geek tree, and here are some thoughts I have about Hallmark's attempt at turning an interplanetary big game hunter into a Yuletide decoration. Read on ...

The plot device of time travel most commonly appears within the science fiction genre, imagining the possibility of a technology that would allow people to freely move forward and backwards through time. Yet when time travel appears in the horror genre in films such as Donnie Darko (2001) and Triangle (2009), the story sometimes ignores the technology idea and instead depicts a reality where warps in time are just random events that happen to hapless, unsuspecting victims. Such a view is a very unnerving one, that something as inescapable and inexorable as time can also be inconceivably unstable and that people can be sucked into parallel timelines or never-ending time loops without anyone else noticing. In the case of The Caller , a 2011 thriller directed by Matthew Parkhill, the story of horrible, unexpected things that can happen when the present unwittingly shares information with the past. The Caller focuses on Mary Kee (Rachelle Lefevre), a woman who just divorced her a...

The latest waves of remote control (RC) flying toys have fascinated me, and their falling prices have tempted me on more than one occassion into actually buying one. Yet while I may be a nerd by choice, I am also a klutz by nature; thus, I'm certain that I'd somehow wind up breaking the toy within days--if not hours or minutes--after purchase. Thankfully, someone at TACS Games understands my geeky dilemma and has recently released Quadcopter Pilot Challenge as a downloadable eShop game for the Wii U. Read on for my complete review.

When horror icon Christopher Lee passed away last June, it felt like a particular era of horror cinema came to an end. Lee led an extremely impressive life, but his contributions to the horror genre--as well as pop culture in general--are truly legendary. In honor of his passing, UK horror magazine We Belong Dead has recently published a special 100 page, full-color issue as a tribute to Lee and the many memorable roles he brought to life on the silver screen. The issue covers Lee's prolific career, from his most popular films ( The Wicker Man , The Lord of the Rings series, his portrayal of Dracula in numerous films, etc.) to his more obscure work ( Night of the Big Heat , Taste of Fear , Nothing but the Night , etc.). The details provided in this issue about Lee's career are exhaustive in scope, both well-researched and well-written by a diverse selection of contributors. Among the personal fan reflections about Lee and in-depth analyses of the films and studios in whi...

In case you've been ignoring American film releases since the beginning of the year, a horror film called It Follows became quite the hit among film critics when it was released last March, scoring a high 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes . I finally got the chance to see it last weekend and while I can see why critics were impressed by this film, I felt that the end result was less than the sum of its parts. Read on for my complete review.