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…
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…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Norliss Tapes’
This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis’s horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role…
Tubular Terrors: ‘Invitation to Hell’
Invitation to Hell definitely follows on well-trod thematic ground, examining the American nuclear family’s impulse to conform and keep up with the Joneses in suburbia. But it’s on the execution, in the casting, and in a few of the left-field plot developments that the film really shines…
Tubular Terrors: ‘Cruise Into Terror’
By K.E. Roberts
World-weary Captain Andrews (Hugh O’Brian) never smiles, but he is especially not smiling today. The company’s luxury liner was overbooked, you see, and he’s been ordered to take eight passengers 800 miles to Mexico on a busted up “battle wagon” (in fact a midsized pleasure boat decorated with ferns)…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The House That Bled to Death’ and ‘Snowbeast’
Apologies in advance to any fellow child of the UK who might be reading this, because for a Brit of my generation, choosing The House That Bled to Death as exemplar of British TV horror is a bit like announcing that your favorite novel is Moby Dick or your favorite food is pizza…
