Tubular Terrors: ‘A Cold Night’s Death’
By J.E. Anckorn
Other reviewers have said that A Cold Night’s Death is an excellent movie so long as you ignore the last five minutes, but I’m here to tell you the opposite is true…
Tubular Terrors: Wes Craven’s ‘Chiller’
By K.E. Roberts
An engraving with the words “They Shall See Tomorrow” hangs outside the cryonics facility at the beginning of Wes Craven’s Chiller (1985), probably the most damning treatment of the ultra-pseudoscientific practice that has ever made it to the screen…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Woman in Black’
The Woman in Black inhabits that odd region of British TV where extremely accomplished but vaguely oppressive location work blends with the kind of eeriness and unease that the generation who had lived through WWII were so gifted at putting on the screen…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Intruder Within’
The year is (probably) 1983 and I am an Alien-obsessed 12-year-old who spends a huge amount of his free time producing appalling felt-tip homages to Giger that not even my grandparents can pretend to be impressed by…
Tubular Terrors: ‘All the Kind Strangers’
All the Kind Strangers also seems to have helped birth a genre all its own centered around isolated, cultish “lost children”—from Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” (1977) to 1979’s classic of suburban anomie Over the Edge…
Screen Time for Rent: Granada TV Commercial, 1977
This 1977 TV commercial for Granada TV Rental opens a window onto an almost forgotten aspect of the relationship the British viewing public once enjoyed with their television sets…
“Splashing the Volcano”: ‘Dianetics’ in the Age of Reaganomics
By K.E. Roberts
Anyone who was watching TV in the late 1980s remembers the commercial: probing personal questions appear in white text on a black screen as a Tangerine Dream-esque synth riff pulsates in the background. ”How can you increase your mind’s potential?”…
“There Ain’t Nothin’ Different”: When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars
By K.E. Roberts
Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…
You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life
By The Mutants
Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you need to believe that goodness prevails?
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Possessed’
Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973’s The Exorcist, the same year’s Satan’s School for Girls, and 1976’s The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period’s ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom…
