Last night I was watching Halloween 5 and thinking, "this movie is absolutely awful, as bad as Jason Takes Manhattan." Well those to movies were made in the same year, 1989, a year when I was getting into horror. It's amazing that I stuck around.
New horror fans, myself included, usually rent the typical titles first, the name ones from the horror franchises. The idea is that, since they have the familiar brand names, they must be the best. Well, that is a misconception. I remember one morning waiting for history class to start when I was in the 10th grade. I was reading a punk zine at my desk that had a horror column which was trashing the typical horror rental tapes. It described a movie where an elevator catches a women's necklace and rips off her head. I know now that the writer must have been referring to Deep Red, but at the time actually tracking down the title seemed out of the question to me. There was no way my local video store would have those titles.
Well I'm sure it did have them, I have not been back home to confirm it, but lots of small town video stores had great tapes. I know it, because I collect those tapes now, and they all have video store labels on them from crazy states no one even lives in. I was blind to the cool tapes in my home town video stores because they were not familiar to me. They looked old and figured they would be boring and tame, but quite the opposite is true. The movies myself and friends were watching were the weak ones, early 90's/late 80's titles like Graveyard Shift, Hellraiser III, Aracnophobia, Sleepwalkers, and Pet Sematary 2. (I do like Stephen King by the way, only one of the movies I listed was his fault) I hope to never mention those movies in this blog again. Movies like Silence of the Lambs and Cape Fear were given the tag 'thriller' to avoid association with the horror genre and very few new titles showed up in my favorite section at the video store. The lack of new horror on my local store's shelf was obvious since at some point in the early 90's they switched their cases from clam shells to clear rubber slip cases that slide over the whole video box. Other sections in the store became saturated with the new movies in the smaller cases (old ones could not be changed over) while the horror section only had a handful. There was The Ice Cream Man, The Mangler, and Leprachaun 4 and that was it.
It's no wonder horror died or was dead during that period and had to be re-invented by those Scream type movies that eventually flooded the scene.
Anyway, I just put down a bunch of films, but really I'm the idiot for being a horror fan that did not even watch good horror movies. I'll write another column about how long it took for me to discover where the good horror came from. That's another sad story.
On the upside, here is a link to a horror site that I've enjoyed perhaps more than all others. This guy is a true fan and has continued a zine he started in 1982 on the web with tons of reviews of the rare and weird horror videos he owns. Each one has a picture too!
The site is called Critical Condition Online.
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