Monster Movie Madness

On June 22, Salem Horror Fest held a midnight showing (actually, 11 p.m. Saturday to 1 a.m. Sunday, but it played across midnight, so it counts) of the newest movie in the Conjuring universe: Annabelle Comes Home (2019), at Cinema Salem, in Salem, Massachusetts. Being forewarned, I took a little nap when I got out of work (don’t scoff. I’m fifty now, and I did work that day, and I just wanted to make sure I could make it through the whole thing, even if it sucked), and was in line early to make sure I got a seat. I got one next to a pair of young gentlemen, one of whom was a horror aficionado (at least according to their pre- Annabelle conversation, which I couldn’t help overhearing), while the other was not. It was the not who turned out to be the more interesting to me. You see, once the lights dimmed and the film started, he seemed unable to stop talking to the screen. He tried very hard to be unobtrusive about it, smothering himself behind at least one hand and...

Author's Note: This was the first review I ever wrote for Cinema Knife Fight, published back in 2015. The exact publication date was lost along with the site itself (see the About page for the fuller story), but I believe it was in March. It's a little long, but hey, I was learning. I'm using it as my first post again mostly so I can look at it and saw "Awww . . ." ~~**~~ AXE GIANT: THE WRATH OF PAUL BUNYAN (2013) (Warning: there are spoilers in this review.) Gary Jones, Jason Ancona and Jeff Miller took the beloved story of Paul Bunyan, an American tall tale about the helpful giant lumberjack who accidentally made the Grand Canyon and—whoops!—stumbled one day to make the Great Lakes, and rewrote him as a savage, vengeful, titanesque idiot, and then handed the whole thing to Gary Jones to direct. What could go wrong? If you’ve ever seen a horror movie from the ’80s then you’ll probably recognize the setup: a bunch of young city-folk heading off...