Author: Jean Jentilet
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April Fool’s Day (1986)

Managing to satirize the dime-a-dozen slashers of the 1980s while executing a perfect rug-pull, April Fool‘s Day remains impressive after forty years. Its succeeds both on its surface level presentation and as a meta commentary, albeit with better production values than most of the films it lovingly sends up. Maybe its best feature is a…
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Together (2025)

A meditation on co-dependency, adulting, and how the consequences of bad life choices can sneak up on you. Great body horror moments and stellar performances are the rising tide that lifts the boat of a predictable story and the ham-fisted wielding of tropes in the tradition of every movie that thinks it transcends the genre.…
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My Bloody Valentine (1981)

In a market glutted with formulaic slashers in the wake of the success of “Friday the Thirteenth,” and continuing the special day bloodbath tradition, “My Bloody Valentine” stands out. The genre had not quite reached peak cynicism, and this movie captures the heart (no pun intended, really) and sense of fun that went into post-exploitation,…
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In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

The third and final installment of our discussion of John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy, complete with iconic bus ride, iconic bike ride, and Charlton Heston, is a visceral descent into insanity, goaded on by the Elder Gods. Lovecraftian in every way, the film, for all there is to recommend it, is missing that special brand of…
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Prince of Darkness (1987)

In Prince of Darkness, Carpenter successfully integrates the beats of a story that would otherwise comfortably accommodate an expansion of the Cthulhu mythos into a vision of the end of creation painted with the broad strokes of Christian eschatology and extraterrestrial speculation. The result is a dread-heavy piece of existential horror and a profoundly haunting…



