Category Archives: retrospective

Troll (1986) and the Curious Curse of John Carl Buechler

21 Wednesday Jan 2026

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There are cult films, and then there are accidents of cinema — features that achieve immortality not through design, but through coincidence, misreading, and sheer historical mischief. Troll (1986) belongs squarely in the latter category: a film remembered less for what it is than for what it accidentally prefigured, misinspired, and became associated with long after its modest ambitions had curdled into kitsch.

And yet, behind the latex ears and ill-fated wizardry stands a filmmaker worth far more respect than this film’s reputation allows.

The Craftsman Behind the Curtain

John Carl Buechler remains one of genre cinema’s great unsung artisans. A gifted special effects designer who helped shape the tactile horrors of Friday the 13th Part VII, Re-Animator, and countless exploitation staples, Buechler belonged to that dying breed of filmmakers who understood monsters as objects — sculpted, painted, and animated by hand.

Troll was his directorial debut, and it bears all the marks of a craftsman promoted too quickly to magician.

There is, undeniably, a handmade charm to the film. The practical effects — crude as they are — possess a sincerity now absent from much digital fantasy. The creatures are physical. The makeup is tangible. You can see the fingerprints of labour in every prosthetic and puppet. But good intentions, sadly, do not summon good storytelling.

The Myth of the Boy Wizard

It is impossible to discuss Troll without addressing the elephant — or rather, the bespectacled boy — in the room.

Long before Hogwarts, long before J.K. Rowling, this film introduced a young protagonist named Harry Potter. The coincidence is so outrageous it has since become the film’s primary cultural legacy. The connection is legally irrelevant, narratively meaningless, and yet historically irresistible. In hindsight, Troll reads like a bootleg prophecy — a cheap VHS oracle accidentally whispering a name that would one day dominate popular culture.

Of course, this Harry Potter is no chosen one. He is a bland, passive child adrift in a narrative that barely knows what to do with him. Magic here is not destiny, but disorder — a grab bag of spells, potions, and goblin politics that never cohere into a convincing mythology.

What remains is not mythology, but meme.

Band, Bono & B-Movie Business

As ever, hovering behind the chaos is Charles Band, Full Moon’s impresario of low-budget fantasy and high-concept nonsense. His influence is everywhere: the tonal instability, the commercial opportunism, the sense that the film is less telling a story than testing a product line.

Troll feels engineered less as a film than as a franchise prototype — a world to be exploited, sequelised, and merchandised. That it eventually spawned the infamously unrelated Troll 2 only underlines how little creative coherence existed at the foundation.

Adding to the oddity is the presence of Sonny Bono, whose performance is less acting than cameo-as-curiosity. He drifts through the film like a misplaced sitcom ghost, never fully belonging to the fantasy world around him, and inadvertently reinforcing the film’s tonal confusion.

And then there is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in an early role that serves primarily as historical footnote. She is capable, charming, and completely underserved — a future comedic titan trapped in a film that barely knows what to do with its own plot, let alone its supporting cast.

A Film at War with Itself

The central problem with Troll is not its budget, nor its effects, nor even its camp. It is its profound indecision.

Is this a children’s fantasy? A horror film? A family comedy? A supernatural soap opera? The film answers “yes” to all, and commits fully to none. Scenes of possession and body horror sit awkwardly beside slapstick and sitcom rhythms. Threat never coheres. Stakes never settle. Even Torok, the film’s central antagonist, oscillates between menace and pantomime.

What emerges is not a failed epic, but a confused one — a film whose imagination outpaces its discipline.

The Legacy of a Miscast Spell

Troll survives not as cinema, but as artifact.

It is remembered because of a name, not a narrative. Because of a sequel, not a success. Because of careers that outgrew it, not because it nurtured them. And yet, within its rubbery frame, there remains a faint trace of Buechler’s genuine love for monsters — a craftsman trying, unsuccessfully, to become a storyteller.

In the end, Troll is less a film than a cautionary tale: about promotion before preparation, about concept without control, about how even the most gifted monster-makers can be undone by a story that refuses to behave.

The Prognosis:

A curiosity. A footnote. A miscast spell that, by sheer accident, echoes through pop culture far louder than it ever deserved.

  • Saul Muerte

Wolf Blood (1925) — A Century Later, Still Howling for a Pulse

15 Monday Dec 2025

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One hundred years on, Wolf Blood remains less a horror film than a cinematic curiosity—an early brush with werewolf mythology that never commits to being a werewolf film, a thriller without thrills, and a relic overshadowed entirely by the genre giants that defined its era. Released in 1925, it limps into its centenary not as a pioneering milestone but as an instructive footnote in what not to do with burgeoning horror iconography.

It’s almost unfair, at first glance, to compare Wolf Blood to Nosferatu (1922) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925)—but the comparison is inescapable. Murnau’s Nosferatu was already reshaping cinematic language, introducing expressionist shadows and spectral dread that embedded itself into the DNA of screen horror. Phantom, released the same year as Wolf Blood, showcased the artistry of Universal’s early macabre sensibilities, anchored by Lon Chaney’s transformative terror and lavish Gothic production design.

Wolf Blood, by contrast, feels timid and strangely uninterested in horror altogether. Where Nosferatu stalked its audience with plague-ridden menace, and Phantom delivered operatic Gothic spectacle, Wolf Blood spends a remarkable portion of its runtime on logging-camp melodrama, business rivalries, and a love triangle so tame it seems allergic to narrative urgency. The title promises lycanthropy; what it delivers is a medical transfusion and a man convinced—psychologically, never literally—that he may be turning into a wolf. No transformation, no bite, no curse. The supernatural is purely theoretical, and the film leans on dream sequences instead of embracing the monstrous.

In the 1920s, horror cinema was still defining its parameters, testing the boundaries of what images could frighten or disturb. Wolf Blood could have been part of that formative experimentation. Instead, it skirts away from genre entirely. Its werewolf premise is never realised; its mood never crosses into the uncanny; and its execution—flat staging, wandering pacing, and little sense of atmospheric danger—renders it a film that neither innovates nor entertains.

Even as proto-werewolf cinema, it is overshadowed by later, more robust entries (Werewolf of London in 1935 and The Wolf Man in 1941), which would properly codify the mythos that Wolf Blood only half-heartedly gestures toward. Its legacy, such as it is, lies in being technically the first feature to reference a form of lycanthropy—though even that badge comes with an asterisk, given that nothing resembling a werewolf appears on screen.

As a centenary artefact, Wolf Blood is valuable mostly in contrast. It reveals how essential atmosphere, visual imagination, and narrative conviction were to early horror’s development—and how barren a horror film becomes without them. While its contemporaries still throb with cinematic life, Wolf Blood feels anaemic, drained of tension and lacking both bite and bark. Forgotten by audiences and film history alike, it stands today as a reminder that not every first is foundational, and not every early effort deserves resurrection.

  • Saul Muerte

Haunted (1995) — A Handsome Ghost Story Searching for Its Own Pulse

29 Saturday Nov 2025

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Lewis Gilbert’s Haunted (1995) is one of those elegant, fog-draped period ghost tales that feels immediately familiar—handsome, atmospheric, well-appointed—yet never quite as stirring or chilling as it promises to be. Sitting in the late-career period of a director best known for shaping British cinema across decades (Alfie, Educating Rita, and a trio of Bond films), Haunted is a curious detour: a genteel supernatural romance wearing the clothes of a Gothic thriller, its pleasures found not in terror but in craftsmanship and star-making potential.

Gilbert brings his signature polish to the material. The English countryside glows with a painterly melancholy; the decaying Edbrook estate feels like a place where secrets seep from the wallpaper; and the film’s structure—rooted in an academic sceptic confronting the irrational—allows Gilbert to indulge in classic ghost story rhythms. But where his earlier work thrived on emotional immediacy and character complexity, Haunted often keeps its characters at an elegant distance. Its chills are tasteful, its reveals measured, its emotional turbulence curiously restrained.

Yet the film holds its greatest historical value in the emergence of Kate Beckinsale. This is the moment she fully announces herself—poised, luminous, and quietly magnetic. As Christina Mariell, Beckinsale blends innocence with a subtle, teasing darkness, foreshadowing the commanding screen presence that would follow in later roles. Haunted isn’t her breakout exactly (that credit often goes to Cold Comfort Farm or The Last Days of Disco), but it’s a pivotal early performance that demonstrates her range within genre cinema long before Underworld made her an international name.

Opposite her, Aidan Quinn delivers a thoughtful turn as Professor David Ash, a man defined by rational armour that Gilbert and the script slowly chip away. Their pairing adds a romantic heat the film otherwise struggles to ignite, helping anchor a narrative that threatens to drift into over-familiar Gothic territory.

The film’s shortcomings are largely tonal. Gilbert aims for a restrained, classical ghost story—something closer to The Innocents than the brasher supernatural thrillers of the 1990s—but the adaptation of James Herbert’s novel leans too heavily on melodramatic twists and over-explanatory reveals. The final act, particularly, gives in to excess at the very moment the film’s strength has been its quietude. You can feel the tension between a director committed to craft and a story eager to indulge in more conventional shock.

The Prognosis:

Haunted remains an enjoyable mid-tier entry in ’90s British genre cinema: undeniably flawed, but handsomely directed, occasionally haunting, and notable for capturing Beckinsale’s ascent at a formative moment. For Gilbert, it stands as a late-career experiment—an elegant but slightly undercooked ghost story that reminds us of his ability to shepherd character-driven drama even when surrounded by ectoplasm, séances, and flickering candlelight.

  • Saul Muerte

Transmutations (1985) — A Curious Misfire in the Barker Cinematic Bloodline

26 Wednesday Nov 2025

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George Pavlou’s Transmutations (also known as Underworld) occupies an awkward, largely forgotten corner in the canon of Clive Barker–related cinema—a curiosity rather than a cornerstone, a footnote rather than a foundation. Released two years before Hellraiser would redefine Barker’s place in the genre, this early attempt at translating his sensibilities to the screen delivers more frustration than fascination, offering only faint glimmers of the nightmarish imagination that would soon reshape horror.

The premise holds the embryonic outline of Barker’s obsessions: flesh in flux, identity undone, desire twisted into mutation. A missing sex worker, a wealthy puppet master, a mercenary ex-lover, and a secret colony of chemically altered outcasts living beneath the city—on paper, it’s unmistakably Barker. But while the ingredients are present, the alchemy is not. Pavlou’s direction lacks the atmosphere and transgressive conviction needed to bring Barker’s script to life, resulting instead in a confused stew of sci-fi noir, body horror, and crime thriller clichés.

What should feel mythic and grotesquely operatic instead feels oddly anaemic. The underground mutants—conceptually ripe territory for Barker’s fascination with monstrous otherness—never rise above rubber-suit awkwardness. Their tragedy is undercut by clumsy execution, their menace diluted by incoherent world-building. Even the film’s central hallucinogenic powder, a classic Barker motif of transcendence through sensation, slips through the story like an undeveloped idea.

For Barker admirers, the film is primarily interesting as a “before the storm” artifact: a glimpse of themes and images he’d later refine with far more confidence, from the eroticised metamorphoses of Hellraiser to the urban-myth underworlds of Nightbreed. Transmutations hints toward these futures but never manages to articulate its own identity. It’s a film caught between genres, visions, and expectations—ultimately satisfying none.

As a mid-1980s horror oddity, it has its moments of charm: a grubby London atmosphere, a handful of practical effects that almost work, and a pulpy energy that occasionally threatens to spark to life. But as part of the Barker cinematic legacy, Transmutations remains a minor and often misguided experiment—one that underscores how vital Barker’s own directorial control would become in shaping the stories he imagined for the screen.

The Prognosis:

A relic for completists, a curiosity for scholars of Barker’s filmography—but for most viewers, it’s easy to see why this particular mutation never evolved.

  • Saul Muerte

Pasolini’s Final Provocation: A Descent Into Filth, Fury, and the Failure of Outrage

22 Saturday Nov 2025

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There are films you watch.
There are films you endure.
And then there is Salò: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final cinematic scream, released weeks after he was murdered on an Ostia beach, his body left grotesquely mangled — an ending uncanny enough that it feels like it might have been authored by Pasolini himself.

To watch Salò is not merely to consume a film; it is to enter a locked chamber of Pasolini’s mind at its most confrontational, most cryptic, and most convinced that art must wound if it hopes to matter. It’s a cinematic razor blade dragged across the audience’s sense of morality, its meaning delivered less through narrative than through abrasion.

And yet — for all its notoriety, for all its moral panic, for all the scholarly wrangling around it — Salò remains a polarising, deeply compromised vision. A film that demands you applaud its audacity while questioning whether its assaultive method ever truly earns its brutality.

The Last Testament of a Man at War

By 1975, Pasolini had become a cultural lightning rod: Marxist poet, queer public intellectual, devout critic of capitalism, devourer of myth and folklore, the “wyrd prophet” of Italy’s post-war anxieties. He remained perpetually in conflict — with the state, the Church, the bourgeoisie, the police, the left, the right, and often himself.

Salò emerges from this volatile crucible as both testament and tantrum — the vision of a man who believed society had already surrendered to a fascism more insidious than Mussolini’s: a consumerist degradation of the human spirit.

By updating de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to the dying days of the Republic of Salò, Pasolini stages fascism not as political ideology but as the terminal condition of a culture that has lost its soul. Every atrocity — the forced meals of excrement, the mechanised sexual violence, the casual execution of youth — is framed with the cold, bureaucratic stillness of a society numbed by its own cruelty.

But the question that haunts Salò, and haunts us still, is this:
Does Pasolini expose fascism, or replicate its gaze?

A Museum of Horrors, Curated With Clinical Precision

The film unfolds in circles — the Anteinferno, the Circle of Obsessions, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Blood — as if Dante himself collaborated with a mortician. Pasolini arranges bodies like objects, frames violence as ritual, and refuses any catharsis that might allow the viewer moral escape.

The performances are deliberately stiff, theatrical, emptied of emotion. The victims are blank slates; the libertines are stylised monsters. Everything is choreographed with a perversely detached elegance.

It is simultaneously the point and the problem.
Pasolini wants to suffocate us — but suffocation is not the same thing as meaning.

Where the Film’s Power Slips

For all its intellectual scaffolding, Salò spirals into a paradox:
Pasolini indicts dehumanisation by dehumanising.
He condemns voyeurism by forcing us to be voyeurs.
He rails against fascism while reproducing its structures.

This is the crux of its polarising legacy.
Some critics call it the most important film of the twentieth century; others consider it an irredeemable wallow in cinematic sadism.

My view — at a measured and wary two stars — sits in the uneasy middle: Pasolini’s overarching thesis is potent, his courage (or recklessness) undeniable, but the film’s unrelenting brutality eventually dulls the intellectual edge it seeks to sharpen. That shock becomes monotony; horror becomes repetition; outrage becomes noise.

There is no escalation, only accumulation.
No revelation, only endurance.
No life — only Pasolini’s autopsy of humanity.

The Haunting Aftermath: Art as Provocation, Art as Suicide Note

And yet, perhaps the true power of Salò lies not in the film itself but in the myth that formed around it. Pasolini died before he could defend it, revise it, or distance himself from it. The film became a tombstone — a final act of aesthetic defiance from a man who had always preferred confrontation to comfort.

His death casts a radioactive glow across Salò.
It colours every frame with an eerie sense of inevitability, as if the film were a prophecy of his own destruction.
You don’t watch Salò thinking about the characters.
You watch it thinking about Pasolini.

The gap between artist and artwork collapses entirely.
Perhaps that is what he intended.
Or perhaps it is the final irony — that a filmmaker obsessed with exposing societal decay has, in his last work, created something that ultimately feels embalmed, sealed off from the living world.

The Prognosis:

Salò remains a cultural Rorschach test: a masterpiece of provocation for some, an act of cinematic masochism for others. My own viewing leaves me with admiration for Pasolini’s audacity, respect for his intellectual rage, and deep reservations about the film’s blunt-force method.

A monumental idea, trapped in a punishing, airless execution.
A film easier to analyse than to justify, and easier to endure than to embrace.

  • Saul Muerte

Minimalist Horror Goes to the Dogs — and Sometimes Finds Its Bark

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

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In the recent wave of minimalist horror — the creeping, patient, anti-spectacle cinema of Skinamarink, In a Violent Nature, The Outwaters, and When Evil Lurks’ quietest passages — fear is less a constructed set piece than a condition. A suffocating stillness. A negative space. A question of what the camera refuses to illuminate. Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy arrives squarely within this movement, committed to the genre’s most ascetic instincts: sparse storytelling, spatial ambiguity, and the eerie potency of silence. What distinguishes Good Boy from its contemporaries, however, is its protagonist — not a faceless killer or traumatised everyman but a 35-pound retriever named Indy, whose performance is so unwavering, so soulful, that he becomes the film’s emotional core and, crucially, its most expressive actor.

Indy’s work here has already made waves. The New York Times’ Erik Piepenburg called his eyes “soft” yet capable of conveying “joy, pathos and, most astonishingly, terror.” Variety’s Peter Debruge praised the film’s ability to “devastate us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.” These aren’t backhanded compliments; they are acknowledgments that Good Boy, for all its supernatural trappings, rests on a profoundly grounded emotional premise — the purity of a dog’s love for its human, and what happens when that human begins to slip into darkness.

The Haunted House as Negative Space

Leonberg’s directing style, shaped by an Eagle Scout pragmatism and an MFA’s sense of craft, embraces an artisanal minimalism. The film’s rural home — long vacant, thick with dust and memory — is not populated by jump scares but by suggestion. Corners breathe. Empty rooms hum with expectancy. The world is haunted not by apparitions but by absence.

This aesthetic places the entire burden of emotional interpretation on Indy, and astonishingly, it works. The dog’s reactions — a lowered head, a whine, a sudden lurch into the dark — become semiotic clues, as if the canine is whispering an alternate plot beneath the human one. In one early scene, Indy freezes at a doorway and refuses to enter, and the hesitation is more chilling than any spectral figure would have been.

Leonberg knows the grammar of minimalist horror: long takes, fixed shots, diegetic silence punctured only by the house’s nocturnal contractions. It’s a mode designed to induce paranoia in the viewer, to make us scrutinise every shadow for signs of the supernatural. The technique is effective — to a point.

The Strength and Strain of Minimalism

Minimalist horror is a delicate architecture. When the premise is razor-thin, pacing becomes everything. Good Boy’s story — Indy senses an invisible presence; Todd succumbs to it — is conceptually strong but narratively sparse. It relies on atmosphere and gesture rather than escalation, and as a result, the film occasionally buckles under the weight of its own simplicity.

Scenes of Indy pacing hallways, staring into voids, or reacting to sounds we never hear create a hypnotic loop that risks repetition. What feels unnerving in the first act begins to sag by the midsection, and although the third act reintroduces urgency, the film’s momentum never fully matches the intensity promised by its premise.

This is not a failure of direction so much as a structural challenge inherent to the genre. When your protagonist cannot speak, when your antagonist remains invisible, and when your environment is deliberately barren, rhythm becomes treacherous terrain. Good Boy is atmospheric, often beautifully so, but the atmosphere sometimes dilates beyond its dramatic utility.

Still, the emotional spine — the bond between Todd and Indy — remains compelling throughout. Their relationship bears the film’s heart, even when the plot stalls.

Indy, the Actor, and Indy, the Idea

To call Indy “remarkably focused” undersells the phenomenon onscreen. He is not a gimmick. He is not comic relief. He is not even, despite the title, simply “a good boy.” He is a full-fledged dramatic participant whose emotional arc mirrors Todd’s psychological unraveling.

We see the supernatural entirely through Indy’s sensory field, and in this choice lies the film’s most unusual power: the horror is not filtered through a traumatised human consciousness but through a loyal animal desperately trying to save someone who does not understand that he is in danger.

Leonberg’s gamble — to build a horror chassis around a dog — pays off because Indy is not performing as a trained animal. He is responding. Feeling. Reacting with an authenticity no human could replicate. If the film unsettles, it is because Indy believes the house is wrong.

Where the Film Lands: Devotion as Haunting

For all its experiments in minimalism, Good Boy is ultimately not about ghosts or curses but about devotion. The supernatural presence may be indistinct, the pacing uneven, the tension sometimes stretched thin, but the thematic clarity never falters: a dog will follow you anywhere, even into the spaces where the living and the dead bleed together.

This is what elevates the film above mere gimmick or novelty. It does not anthropomorphise Indy; it recognises something purer — the instinctive loyalty, the unguarded love, the readiness to protect. In a genre built on human fragility, Good Boy dares to centre an animal’s emotional resilience.

The Prognosis:

Good Boy is a compelling addition to the minimalist horror boom, a film that combines handcrafted genre sensibilities with an unusual and affecting performance from its canine star. While its slender premise occasionally stretches too thin, and its pacing wavers under the constraints of its aesthetic, the film remains memorable for the very thing that makes it risky: its sincerity.

A haunting, heartfelt experiment that sometimes falters but never loses sight of the bond at its core.

  • Saul Muerte

Good Boy streams on Shudder from Nov 21

Chains of Creation: Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak and the Prison of the Gothic

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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By the mid-1990s, Castle Freak found Stuart Gordon at a fascinating crossroads — caught between the transgressive brilliance of his early H.P. Lovecraft adaptations (Re-Animator, From Beyond) and the low-budget constraints of Charles Band’s Full Moon Productions. The result is a lean, mean Gothic chamber piece that struggles against its limitations but ultimately bears the unmistakable fingerprints of its director: bodily horror, familial guilt, and tragedy masquerading as terror.

Working once again with his creative muse Jeffrey Combs and the always-captivating Barbara Crampton, Gordon turns what could have been a cheap European monster movie into something strangely mournful. The story — of an American family inheriting a crumbling Italian castle, only to discover a deformed, feral creature locked away in the basement — feels familiar, yet it’s given a raw, unsettling emotional core. Combs’ performance, as a guilt-ridden father trying to hold his fractured family together, brings unexpected pathos to the proceedings, while Crampton’s quiet sorrow grounds the film’s more grotesque flourishes.

What separates Castle Freak from the endless churn of Full Moon’s ‘90s horror output is Gordon’s eye for discomfort. Despite being shot on a shoestring budget and with a skeletal crew, he still finds moments of painterly dread — the cold stone corridors, the echo of chains, the creature’s mournful moans. And yet, for all its ambition, the film is tethered by its financial and creative confines. The gore lands, the atmosphere lingers, but the pacing sags. It’s a haunted house story without quite enough haunting.

In retrospect, Castle Freak stands as a minor but meaningful entry in Gordon’s canon — a film where his thematic obsessions (sexual repression, guilt, the monstrous within) are filtered through Full Moon’s direct-to-video pragmatism. The collaboration with Charles Band may have clipped his wings, but Gordon’s voice still resonates through the decay. There’s a sadness to the film’s cruelty, a sense that the freak chained in the cellar isn’t just a monster, but a metaphor for Gordon’s own creative captivity within the B-movie machine.

The Prognosis:

Castle Freak may not reach the delirious heights of Re-Animator or From Beyond, but as a bleak Gothic tragedy disguised as exploitation, it remains one of the most distinctive horrors of the Full Moon era — a mournful howl echoing through the ruins of genre cinema’s most daring mind.

  • Saul Muerte

Mind Over Murder: Revisiting Psychic Killer and the Occult Obsessions of 1970s Horror

07 Friday Nov 2025

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The mid-1970s were a time when horror cinema flirted with the unseen — the intangible spaces between science and spirituality, psychology and the paranormal. Ray Danton’s Psychic Killer (1975) is a fascinating, if uneven, artifact of that cultural moment, where the anxieties of post-Vietnam disillusionment met the popular fascination with the occult, parapsychology, and the power of the mind untethered from the body.

Based on the novel The Killer Inside by Mardi Rustam, the film follows Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton), a wrongfully institutionalised man who learns the ancient art of astral projection and proceeds to exact vengeance on those responsible for his suffering. It’s a premise steeped in the decade’s obsession with transcendental revenge — an idea that pain, repression, and injustice could manifest as supernatural liberation.

Danton, better known for his acting than his directing, crafts a film that hovers between drive-in pulp and metaphysical inquiry. The astral projection sequences, with their spectral double imagery and off-kilter editing, gesture toward something headier than the average exploitation film, though the execution never quite escapes its grindhouse trappings. Still, Psychic Killer taps into that 1970s preoccupation with unseen forces — from Carrie to The Exorcist to The Fury — suggesting that the mind itself was the new frontier of horror.

Hutton’s performance adds unexpected melancholy, his vengeance driven less by malice than by a desperate desire for release — from guilt, trauma, and the body itself. Julie Adams and Paul Burke provide sturdy genre support, though the film’s episodic structure and inconsistent tone often dilute the tension.

Yet for all its flaws, Psychic Killer endures as a strangely poignant entry in the occult horror canon. Its blend of parapsychology, revenge thriller, and low-budget surrealism makes it a spiritual cousin to Patrick (1978) and The Medusa Touch (1978), exploring how psychic phenomena became a metaphor for repressed rage and moral imbalance.

Half a century on, Psychic Killer stands as both a relic and a reflection — a film that captured the 1970s hunger to look beyond the flesh, even if what it found there was merely the echo of human cruelty.

The Prognosis:

A curious, hypnotic slice of 1970s occult cinema — not wholly successful, but undeniably of its time and temperament.

  • Saul Muerte

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge — The Scream That Wouldn’t Stay Silent

02 Sunday Nov 2025

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40 Years Later, Freddy’s Most Controversial Outing Finds Its Voice

When A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge was released in 1985, it was branded the misfit of the franchise — the sequel that neither understood nor respected Wes Craven’s original nightmare logic. It broke the rules, confused the mythology, and, for years, stood as an awkward entry that fans politely stepped around on their way from the original to Dream Warriors. Yet four decades on, this strange, feverish sequel has become something else entirely: a film reborn through reinterpretation, its queerness no longer subtext but the key to its survival.

Directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin, Freddy’s Revenge abandoned the dream-bound terror that defined Craven’s universe. Instead, it placed Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund, as gleefully unhinged as ever) in the real world, emerging from the subconscious of a high-school boy, Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton). Freddy doesn’t haunt Jesse’s dreams so much as possess his waking body — a metaphor that was once dismissed as clumsy and now reads as heartbreakingly potent.

For years, Sholder and Chaskin denied any intentional queer coding in the script, even as the evidence screamed from the screen: Jesse’s confusion, his attraction to his male friend, the locker-room glances, the visit to a leather bar, the purging of desire through literal combustion. It’s a coming-of-age horror written in the language of repression. Mark Patton, himself a closeted gay actor navigating the homophobic undercurrents of 1980s Hollywood, became the unwitting vessel for a film that mirrored his own struggle. What was once derided as camp excess has since been reclaimed as a bold, if accidental, act of visibility.

Stylistically, Sholder’s direction can’t match Craven’s dreamlike precision. The suburban sets feel overlit, the kills lack imaginative flair, and the final act collapses under a barrage of rubber and fire. Yet, there’s something raw in its awkwardness — an emotional exposure that feels more personal than any of the slick sequels that followed. Freddy’s transformation from an abstract nightmare into an embodiment of internal fear makes Freddy’s Revenge less a horror film and more a psychological exorcism.

In hindsight, the film’s flaws have become its strengths. Where Dream Warriors polished the franchise into pop spectacle, Freddy’s Revenge remains stubbornly intimate — sweaty, confused, and unafraid of its own vulnerability. It’s a film that accidentally said too much, and in doing so, became something greater than its makers intended: a queer text born out of repression, now celebrated for the same reasons it was once mocked.

Forty years later, Freddy’s second outing stands as the series’ most haunted film — not by Krueger’s knives, but by the ghosts of shame, identity, and self-discovery. It may not be the nightmare Wes Craven envisioned, but it’s one that has found its audience at last.

The Prognosis:

Flawed, fascinating, and deeply human — Freddy’s Revenge remains the bravest mistake the franchise ever made.

  • Saul Muerte

“Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street” — Reclaiming the Dream

When Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019) premiered, it reframed one of horror cinema’s most divisive sequels through a lens of personal redemption. Co-directed by Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen, the documentary follows actor Mark Patton — once dubbed “the first male scream queen” — as he confronts both the film’s legacy and the industry that nearly erased him.

For decades, Patton lived in self-imposed exile, burned by the fallout from Freddy’s Revenge. His performance, ridiculed in its time for its “unintended” homoerotic undertones, became a scapegoat for a film that studio executives and creatives refused to acknowledge as queer. The doc reveals the painful aftermath: the homophobia of the 1980s Hollywood system, the stigma surrounding the AIDS crisis, and the way Patton’s career dissolved in the shadow of a film that mirrored his inner life too closely.

What Scream, Queen! achieves — and why it remains essential viewing — is its reclamation of authorship. It positions Patton not as a victim of misinterpretation but as the heart of Freddy’s Revenge, the one who gave its confused metaphors a pulse. His confrontation with screenwriter David Chaskin, who long denied the script’s queer coding before finally conceding its intent, is one of the most cathartic moments in horror documentary history.

In essence, the film transforms Freddy’s Revenge from franchise oddity into a landmark of queer horror — not because it was perfect, but because it survived. It reminds us that horror, at its best, is a mirror for the things we’re told to fear — even, and especially, ourselves.

Saw II — The Trap That Tightened a Franchise

27 Monday Oct 2025

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When Saw II was released in 2005, it had an impossible task: to follow the breakout success of James Wan’s original and prove that Saw wasn’t just another low-budget horror one-off, but the beginning of something larger, more sinister, and self-sustaining. Against all odds, Darren Lynn Bousman’s entry did exactly that — sharpening the film’s identity, expanding its mythology, and cementing the Jigsaw Killer as a horror icon for a new generation.

Picking up not long after the first film’s shocking conclusion, Saw II takes the bones of its predecessor — moral punishment, psychological manipulation, and fiendish traps — and amplifies them to grotesque, crowd-pleasing extremes. This time, the carnage unfolds within a locked house where eight strangers must endure a gauntlet of Jigsaw’s cruel “games.” Meanwhile, Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) squares off with the captured Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) in a battle of wits that quickly devolves into psychological warfare.

It’s here that the Saw mythology truly begins to click. Bell’s chilling, deliberate performance transforms Jigsaw from a mystery man into a complex, almost philosophical monster. His calm demeanor and twisted logic give the sequel an intellectual edge — a villain not motivated by chaos, but by ideology. Bousman understands this perfectly, letting Jigsaw’s moral justifications simmer beneath the bloodshed, giving the film a strange sense of purpose amid its brutality.

Stylistically, Bousman builds on Wan’s blueprint but injects it with a slicker, more frenzied energy. The editing — all whip cuts and strobing flashbacks — feels very much of its era, yet it works to maintain a sense of claustrophobia and panic. The traps are nastier, more elaborate, and more narratively integrated, a formula that would define the Saw sequels for years to come. The infamous needle pit alone remains one of horror’s most viscerally memorable moments.

Shawnee Smith’s return as Amanda adds emotional texture to the series, elevating what could have been mere torture porn into something approaching tragedy. Her character’s deepened arc — and the film’s final twist — deliver one of the franchise’s most satisfying payoffs, setting a gold standard for the Saw saga’s trademark rug-pulls.

While it lacks the lean precision and bleak originality of the first film, Saw II compensates with confidence and scope. Bousman proves himself adept at juggling the franchise’s moral ambiguity with its appetite for shock, crafting a sequel that’s both grimly entertaining and foundational to what Saw would become.

The Prognosis:

A deftly executed sequel that turned a clever horror film into a cultural phenomenon, Saw II expanded the lore and gave the Jigsaw Killer his voice. Darren Lynn Bousman’s confident direction, Tobin Bell’s chilling gravitas, and Shawnee Smith’s tortured return all combine to make this one of the series’ strongest entries. It’s the moment the Saw machine really started to hum — and slice.

  • Saul Muerte