COOP COOPER is an independently syndicated film critic with a split personality. His “Southern Side” prints mainstream reviews that appear in various print publications across the mid-south. His “Dark Side” from Los Angeles befouls the site with reviews of horror and grindhouse flicks. Welcome to the site where COOP’s two halves (and his contributors) review and debate the latest film/DVD releases…

With vampires en vogue at the moment, Hollywood has been struggling to figure out how to cash in on the latest horror movie craze. Understanding that not all viewers are enraptured by the “Twilight” phenomenon, studios have been struggling to develop vampire-themed properties that show potential for larger appeal. “Daybreakers” attempts a big-budgeted stab at making vampires marketable to the action-horror crowd, but the filmmakers don’t seem to realize when they’re flogging a dead horse…

High on the heels of the runaway box office hit “Paranormal Activity,” another “found footage” scare flick has entered the scene just shy of the Halloween season. Touting itself as a dramatization of supposedly real taped hypnosis sessions that reveal alien abductions, the creators of “The Fourth Kind” made a sizable gamble. “The Blair Witch Project” was ten years ago and found footage films had not regained a foothold in the genre until “Paranormal Activity” came around. Add to the fact no one expected the escalating hype and sudden wide release of “PA” and “The Fourth Kind” gets the lucky boost it needs for box office success. There’s one major difference between these two films…

(NOTE: Due to… 1. the Halloween Holiday 2. a trip out of state and 3. a lack of a working laptop, The Small Town Critic website will go on vacation until Nov. 4 when I will be bringing you a review of “Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day” – Coop)

Here’s a Halloween tip for those of you NOT particularly jazzed about seeing a horror movie in the theater. It might not be your thing, but sometimes you end up doing it; whether it’s your date choosing the movie, a group decision or it’s something you really want to see despite your aversion to acute fright…

Does anyone remember that bizarre pop song that Alice Cooper did for the Friday the 13th movie franchise? Yeah, I didn’t either until a friend reminded me that it existed. FT13 Part 6 was poised to resurrect (literally) the flailing franchise who already saw the demise of it’s main character, Jason, in IV and replaced him with a temporary impostor in V. Nobody liked that, so what was their solution for 6? Death to Arnold Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter. Just kidding, but not really…

“Zombieland” is an R-rated “Ghostbusters” for the new millennium. This crowd-pleasing film has won over jaded audiences and critics from coast to coast, taking most of its inspiration from a source I did not anticipate… blockbuster comedies from the 1980’s. It has elements that put it in the same category as “Vacation” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” resurrecting a tone and atmosphere I thought was long gone from the films of today. For this reason, I’m giving it my highest recommendation, not only to horror fans, but to those who miss the heyday of actors like Chevy Chase and Bill Murray.

Set months after the destruction of the world, neurotic college student Columbus (Jessie Eisenberg) has survived the zombie apocalypse by following his own set of obsessive/compulsive rules…

Bless the Oxford Film Freak. After monitoring screening news about Paranormal Activity: Evidence of a Haunting like a hawk, I thought I had the lowdown on when it might show near me, like say in Memphis, TN. The projections: Not likely. Apparently Memphis doesn’t have the cinematic pull as Lincoln, Nebraska or Cleveland, Ohio (bollocks, I say) and wouldn’t be getting a midnight screening. Then I got word of a last minute screening in Memphis at the Indie Memphis Film Festival at the fantastic Studio on the Square Theater. The kicker… Craig Brewer (Memphis native/director of Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan) would be introducing the film.

Jackpot!…

That’s right, I said it. The cat’s out of the bag. There’s no going back now…

Michael Dougherty’s long-beleaguered holiday film has finally found a wide-release on video. Originally slated for a theatrical release in October 2007, Warner Bros. suddenly shelved it with no explanation. The rumor was that the bigwigs feared it would bomb competing against Saw IV and then Saw V the following year. Not seeing an end to the Saw tradition of releasing a high-grossing film every Halloween (Saw VI releases this month), The WB decided to dump Trick ‘R Treat to a DVD/Blu-Ray release for Oct. 6 and market the hell out of it for one month.

What a low-down, dirty shame. One of the best Halloween movies of all time, it gets delayed for two years and it doesn’t even get a theatrical release. I hope someone leaves a flaming bag of crap at the Warner Brothers studio gate for that one…

I’m giving this one 4 and 1/2 out of 5 stars. Now you know how I feel about it right off the bat. Why the urgency? Because like many others, I waffled in seeing it. For this reason, it’s tanking like Ishtar which isn’t fair at all because it’s a great sci-fi film that deserves a dedicated following of fans, and it may not be in the theaters much longer.

It’s one of the oldest pitches in the book: “A guy wakes up in a ______ with amnesia, so he must solve the mystery of who he is, how he got there and why someone (or something) is after him.”…

Texas Chain Saw Massacre III: Leatherface (1990) was the biggest budget production of the original Chain Saw franchise before Michael Bay got his grubby little hands on them. It starred a young Viggo Mortensen as the handsome and deadly “Tex”, reliable character actor Tom Everett as a babbling maniac and genre legend Ken Foree as a heroic survivalist nut.

Oh yeah, and Leatherface sports a sweet mullet…

Nope, it’s not movie news per se, BUT I’m trying to ease back into the horror scene after a long, pre-Halloween slumber. I’m kicking in the movie scene by reviewing Pandorum in the next day or two, but when a bunch of cartoon characters from “Adult Swim” can singlehandedly resurrect the flagging “death metal” scene, that’s news for the ages. Dethalbum II, by the fictional band Dethklok, hit iTunes last night at midnight and I downloaded it immediately. Why? Because Dethalbum I was so popular and completely owned the genre it satirizes…

Okay, so I’m on an indie horror kick at the moment. Sue me. It’s that time of the year.

These are two that I’m highly anticipating. Not good considering I doubt I (or you) will get to see either anytime soon.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: EVIDENCE OF A HAUNTING
Hitting the festival circuit for awhile now (at least since 2007), this Blair Witch-type found-footage film capitalizes on a very simple idea… A couple move into a new place. Weird things start happening so they set up some video cameras to try and solve the mystery. Things get scary. So scary in fact that it’s rumored that audience members…

I’m making this a spoiler-heavy, in-depth review because of the fact that Pontypool could’ve been a great horror movie. In fact, the first half was near flawless.

But I’ll get to that. Boy will I ever. You see, I got a few favorite concepts out there that work great by themselves. Sometimes a smarty pants comes along and merges two of the concepts to create what I call a “super concept.” It’s kinda like when rock stars from different bands get together to form “super bands.” Sometimes it works (Traveling Wilburys), sometimes it doesn’t (Hear ‘n Aid). This concept worked… almost. In what amounts to a mix of Talk Radio, Night of the Living Dead and War of the Worlds, we meet…

It’s a sad weekend when your best new release choice is another lousy horror remake. I strongly disliked director Rob Zombie’s first “Halloween” remake in execution and in principle. It made a mint, but was so poorly received by critics and fans of the original classic, the indignant Zombie swore to not do a sequel. Two years later he broke that promise with a sequel even poorer than his first. Methinks dollar signs and ego played a part in his decision to beat a dead horse and I sincerely doubt after this stinker, anyone would want to see a third…

Count yourself lucky if you’ve ever seen this movie prior to today. It’s a rare find on DVD and appears sporadically on the Independent Film Channel. It Came Without Warning aka Without Warning aka Alien Warning aka The Warning aka Alien Encounter aka Alien Shock scared the heck out of me in 1980 with its shocking televised promo spots. The normally tame programming would interrupt to show humans being attacked by frisbee monsters thrown by a giant alien with an over-sized noggin. At 4 (or possibly 5) years old, I was horrified at seeing those images.

Years later, I had completely forgotten the name of the…

Recycling is all the rage these days. In my neighborhood up in the Pacific Northwest, it’s almost a religion. In Michigan it’s actually mandatory – but at 10¢ a can, who’s complaining? Yep, taking a discarded resource and reshaping it into a usable commodity for a fraction of the cost of producing new materials is nothing new. In fact Hollywood has been doing just that for decades…

Like some kind of evil sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fourth Kind takes real file footage from supposed alien abductees under hypnosis in Nome, Alaska and fictionalizes their stories for the silver screen.

Milla Jovovich plays Abby, a shrink who discovers a disturbing similarity in her patients’ nightmares. They all have visions of an owl at their window, paralysis, intense fear, yadda-yadda. The deeper she delves into this mystery, the scarier it gets. Under hypnosis, patients relive their terror as aliens…

I’ll wager very few X-Files fans know that Mitch Pileggi (Assistant Director Skinner) on the popular show got his genre start as a crazed serial killer. That’s right, old Uncle Mitch once played Horace Pinker, one of the meanest villains ever to grace the silver screen. He’s so mean, he even nearly beat his son to death for interfering with matricide. He’s so mean, he gets his jollies wasting entire families with a Rambo knife. He’s so mean, even the Electric Satan won’t let him die after an execution by electric chair…

Just saw the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated (3 out of 5 stars) about how how the Motion Picture Association of America has one of the most powerful, secretive and arbitrarily unchecked bureaucratic systems in the U.S. When you can hand down a rating for a movie (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) and not have to give a reason, nor reveal who made the decision, you’ve got an abuse of power there, sir! While I usually don’t have too many qualms with their system – because frankly…

The much-lauded indie horror movie about a motherhood nightmare has gotten a lot of attention as of late. Some critics have called it the greatest and most disturbing horror film of the new millennium. I went far out of my way to check it out based on the enigmatic reviews and praise.

Madeline (Jordan Ladd), a vegan and new-age nut, desperately wishes to conceive a child with her husband (Steven Park) after 2 previous miscarriages. Her doctor/midwife – and secret former lesbian lover – Dr. Patricia Lang (Samantha Ferris) promises to help her…

Around the time The Lost Boys (1987) released, vampire movies just weren’t scary anymore. I’m going to credit Boys for contributing to that. By no means is it an effective horror movie. However, it’s a culturally iconic movie of the 80’s, full of attractive young stars, a sexy attitude and marks some of the interesting (and questionable) fashion of the decade. If I had to sum up this film in one word, that word would have to be “cucumber.” As in “cool as a…”