great news, sports fans...?

It seems that All the Boys Love Mandy Lane may finally see the friggin' light of day: latest intel from the front lines has it pegged for an August release. Gee, that's only a bit more than a year since I saw it!

On the other hand, Bloody-Disgusting is saying that the release date is still up in the air (without actually referring to a release date). I'm just going by info I got this week from the PR company, so who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men if it'll be out in August or not?

Wow, I guess we're still at square one. Or not. Maybe. That didn't answer anything...or did it?

That Mandy Lane, she's such a tease!

Proving once and for all that I'm truly a nerd...

...(as if it hasn't been made clear 73075094 times in the past) this week at AMC's Monsterfest Blog I talk about horror comics that have hit the big screen.

Below I'm posting some pages from Tomb of Dracula #69, in particular the sequence I bring up in the column, the sequence that rocked my little socks B in the D. And excuse me, the third panel on the last page, page 27? Where the "dead ones laugh"? Fuck that. That's some GD scary shit. I'm telling you, this comic blew me the eff away no matter how many times I read it.

And yes, I got this issue signed by writer Marv Wolfman and the amazing amazing amazing penciller Gene Colan. I'm not one to get my comics signed, but this one is sort of special for me- it's the first comic book I remember buying (not this actual copy, mind you- that one is long gone) and it really helped put little Final Girl on the road to horror & comic...err, glory. Or something.

Holy crap, it smells like nerd in here.

Clicken ze images to embiggen, and check out a few horrifying pages from the penultimate issue of one of the finest horror comics ever produced.





If you want to read the series yourself- and I know you do- then I suggest picking up the first three volumes of Marvel's Essential Tomb of Dracula. Sure, the books are reprinted in black and white, but that only serves to make Colan's art more delicious. You can get the entire run- 70 issues!- for only a little more than cover price. I'm talking 1970's cover prices, babies! Whatta steal!

Volume One - Volume Two - Volume Three

There's even a Volume Four which reproduces many Dracula tales from other Marvel horror mags and includes killer art from the likes of heavyweights Colan, John Buscema, and Neal Adams.

Man, I should get some sort of endorsement fee or something. Meh. You know what? Making you happy is all the payment I need.

AWW, I SAY.

awesome movie poster friday- the POLTERGEIST edition!

The third one down is the US advance poster and I have no idea what it says- this was the best copy I could find.

I have such a warm spot in my heart for Poltergeist. I saw it at the drive-in with my parents when it came out and it blew me away. The scene where the dude rips off his own face and plops the pieces in the sink grossed me out so bad I made my mom take me to the concession stand for fear I was gonna barf. Poltergeist really fucked with my head!

why don't you go read some other site?

Yeah, YOU. Why don't you go take a gander at the AMC Monsterfest Blog where they've posted yet another column by moi truly? Hmm? Well, why don't you?

This time 'round it's all about made-for-TV horror movies.

I think I'm turning into an old person who lives only to talk about the past. It's as if I spend all my days at the horror version of a VFW Post or something, reminiscing about that time Johnny got his leg blown off and I reattached it with only spit, leaves, and moxie...only there seems to be a serious lack of pancake breakfasts at this Post.

Mayhaps next week I'll make an attempt to write about something that These Kids Today can really relate to, like Crystal Pepsi or rock-n-roll. Or Rob Zombie movies! No one ever talks about Rob Zombie movies. Or torture porn! That would be awfully topical, don't you think?

Holy crap I love Salem's Lot.

all the uzhies

In light of the imminent release of The Ruins, Entertainment Weekly Online has published a list of the 20 Scariest Films of All Time (At Least For Now) (I added that last part because, you know, I've got hope that there's more uber-scary films out there in ideaspace soon to be made). You could probably name all 20 right this second without even glancing at the list, as it's all the usual suspects: The Exorcist, The Shining, An American Werewolf in London...you know the drill. I suppose I pretty much agree with the list, though I'm a bit surprised that The Blair Witch Project was omitted. Of course, lists like this are all about opinion...and if EW wants to be a bunch of jerks, they can be a bunch of jerks all they want.

While the list itself is nothing new, I still suggest you go take a gander because the picture gallery rocks. Somehow for most of the films they're showcasing photos that seem (to me, at least) fresh, new, and rare instead of the same old tired stills. In other words, not the usual suspects.


I don't know...if you're as nerdy as I am, somehow this seems exciting.

don't tell mom, the babysitter's hobnobbing with satanists

Unless you’re Paris Hilton, chances are when you hit your teens your parents put a stop to your weekly allowance and forced you to get a “real job”.

Wait, ARE you Paris Hilton? OMG hi! I totally saw you at the Scream Awards last year and you were, like, skipping down the hall and I thought that was funny. And I’ve totally copped your method for avoiding talking to people- you know, pretending to talk on your cell phone? Except I’m always forgetting my cell phone so I end up, like, talking into a fruit smoothie or my elbow and people look at me all funny. Are you and Nicole Richie still friends? I saw that episode of The Simple Life where you worked at Sonic for a day and it was—

Sorry, got off track for a second there*. The point is, jobs for teenagers tend to suck, don’t they? Retail this, fast food that, mow this, deliver that; no wonder teenagers are so damn sullen all the time. In my opinion, the worst of the worst job is the one that girls are most often saddled with: babysitting. If you’ve got kids, I’m sure they’re lovely. If you can relate to kids and you love babysitting, you’re awesome. Me? I just don’t really get ‘em- nor do I get the appeal of looking after someone’s kids for money. The idea of getting paid something like a dollar an hour to be saddled with the enormous responsibility of, you know, someone’s life is a bit much for me, even if the family should offer up “all the sodas you can drink!”

I say all of this after having successfully completed the Babysitter’s Training Course in 8th grade. Might I add, I even passed with flying colors- I emerged from the course with an arcane knowledge of snack mixes and I correctly circled “Call 911” in response to the question “What should you do if the baby explodes?” Regardless of my stellar performance, my certificate declaring me a competent babysitter didn’t inspire me to seek out work in that particular field as a teen- I chose the “retail hell” route instead. In fact, in my life I’ve babysat exactly one time...as an adult...for a co-worker who was in a real bind. I spent the day with her three ADD-riddled punkass brats and while it was happening, I wanted to kill myself. I came home with the migraine to end all migraines and something like $15 for my troubles. If I still had that stupid babysitting certificate lying around, I surely would have set it afire with only the power of my rage-filled thoughts!

As if that day weren't enough to put me further off of babysitting until the end of time (plus a week), then horror movies certainly would be. Hi, Laurie Strode, anyone? Or "Have you checked the children?" Babysitters, as a rule, do not fare well in the horror realm.

"Oh my God...there are children in the house?!"

Yesterday, Cinematical brought news of House of the Devil, a flick currently in production about a babysitter getting mixed up with a family of devil worshippers. Seriously, they had me at the devil-worshipping mom is played by Mary Woronov.

In my mind, this movie will be a throwback to an era when movies about Satan and Company were abundant and nonsensical. These kids today will deem House of the Devil "slow and boring", whilst I will deem it "atmospheric and awesome". The supernatural '70s will be back, baby- back in a big way! We'll see the DVD release of many weird and creepy thrillers such as The Haunting of Julia. The success of House of the Devil will show studio execs that original properties can rock and the remake train will derail for a little while. A seismic shift will occur in the world of horror moviemaking, and I can't wait!

So say we all.


*You know, I get off-topic and go all tangent-y here at Final Girl all the time. It's kind of what I do, though I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing. Do you think it's a good thing, or do I ramble on about irrelevant crap so much that you get bored and confused? I'm always scolded gently reminded by editors at other websites for which I occasionally write that I need to stay on-topic more and be more precise. Is my style being hampered by The Man, or is my "style" only a "style" in my head? Has writing only to please myself- on a blog of all places- led to my growing a garden in desperate need of a trim? No, that's not a euphemism, yes, it probably doesn't make sense...and yes, I'd really like to know what you think.

awesome movie poster friday- the LARRY COHEN edition!

This edition is brought to you by a discussion I had with a friend about Wicked Stepmother, which I can't say I've seen. Somehow, though, I find the fact that Bette Davis's last film was a Larry Cohen schlockfest a little amusing and a LOT depressing. It's Bette fucking Davis, y'all! Even though by the time this film rolled around (1989) she'd already been dead for seven years but didn't yet realize it...I don't know, she deserved better. Of course, as I said, I've never seen it, so it could be an amazing film for all I know. There are conflicting stories as to why Davis only appears in part of the movie; quoth the imdb trivia:

According to Ms. Davis, she was so disgusted by the script that she demanded it be rewritten, and left when the filmmakers refused. The script was then reshaped to explain her absence. Larry Cohen says Davis had to leave for New York for medical reasons and that she later claimed she left because of the script because she was worried she wouldn't be able to get another job if people thought she was in too bad health.

Yeah, that poster for It's Alive with the hand emerging in a sinister fashion from the bassinet is the one that absolutely terrified me when I was a wee bonny lass. Effective poster, I guess!

Is that a bassinet? I don't know from baby accessories and accoutrements.

Note the lack of posters for last year's Captivity (written by Cohen), because...fuck Captivity.

Sir Linkzalot

Yo, mamas! Another week, another column over at AMC's Monsterfest Blog. This go-round it's a bit of a loving ode to the glory of 3D horror, albeit delivered in my usual rambly, tangent-laced, is she on The Crack? style. Seriously, I can't believe AMC is letting me play in their sandbox. I feel way out of my league!


The ever-lovin' Piper over at Lazy Eye Theatre has provided the public with a helpful guide to atmospheric water masses. Be informed, kids...and be safe!

Arbogast manages to name-drop photographer Cindy Sherman as he ruminates on the Funny Games poster, which means that Arbogast rules. I loves me some Cindy Sherman, y'all, for reals.

Alright, so today's more like Sir Linkzalittle. There's plenty of good non-Final Girl reading material to be found over in my sidebar, or hit up The Lamb for more. Jesus, I can't do all the work for you, you lazy bastards!

And I heard? This one time...

Ah, the urban legend. We've all heard countless tales of people dying when they consume soda and Pop Rocks simultaneously, or that guy who woke up to find "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light?" scrawled in blood on his wall, or "No really, my sister's friend totally knew this chick who got this cactus from Mexico and then one day she went to the doctor because she had really bad cramps and it turns out that all these spiders that were living in the cactus built a nest inside of her and all these baby spiders came out of her vagina." Good times, good times. Urban legends have long provided fodder for horror movies- horror movies like, uh, Urban Legend, Urban Legends: The Final Cut, and Urban Legends: Bloody Mary.

Fingerprints (2006) is supposedly based on one of these tall tales, but it's a new one to me: if you put your car in neutral on these train tracks where a bunch of kids died in an accident, the ghosts of the children will push your car to safety and leave behind ghostly fingerprints on your car windows. It all seems plausible to me- kids are always leaving filthy, greasy fingerprints everywhere in life, so why not in the afterlife?

feel the terror

In 1957 in an unnamed small town, a bus full of smiling, singing children meets the business end of a train when the guard and signal light at the track crossing fail. Ever since that dark and stormy night, the citizens of Unnamed Town have experienced a strange phenomenon at the site of the accident: if you put your ear to the train tracks, you can just make out the faint strains of Carol Channing singing "Hello, Dolly!"


No wait, sorry. What I meant was, if you put your car in neutral on the tracks, it'll roll off. Not nearly as exciting as Carol Channing, but still.

Melanie (Leah Pipes) arrives in Unnamed Town fresh out of rehab, ready to start life afresh and reunite with her bitch-cuckoo mom, her pushover-whipped dad, and her bland-hot sister (Kristin Cavallari). Boy, lemme tell ya, kicking heroin was a walk in the park compared to life in Unnamed Town for poor Melanie! Kids in school are mean because she's an ex-druggie, this one boy from school totally tries to rape her, and this little mute girl named Julie keeps following her everywhere.

As you could expect from any teenage girl, Melanie decides to solve The Mystery of Julie. Over several days of wacky adventures, she digs around the abandoned bus depot, talks to the town drunk, sees messages written in blood in various places, and chats with Sally Kirkland. It turns out that Julie is Sally Kirkland's sister- and one of the children who died in the horrible bus accident all those years ago! It might have been a shocking twist if we hadn't seen Julie riding the bus at the beginning of the film.

And yes, I'm calling Sally Kirkland Sally Kirkland instead of her character name, because it's just better that way.

Lest ye think you've got it all figured out, however, Fingerprints continues to deliver twists and turns, oh my brothers and sisters. Someone, you see, is killing the teenagers of Unnamed Town...who could it be?

no really, feel the terror

It's someone in a train conductor's outfit, that's who! Yup: after about a half hour of...well, nothing, Fingerprints turns into a slasher film. Melanie continues to get her Columbo on and finds out a bunch of crap that makes only a little sense: the bus accident never happened, someone was actually killing children back in 1957, there was some Nightmare on Elm Street-style justice, something about building highways and knocking down depots, and Sally Kirkland sports an "I do declare!" southern accent for no apparent reason.

a slumming Lou Diamond Phillips feels the terror, literally

All in all, it's a terribly dull affair. There's not much action to be found, and what little there is is decidedly unscary. The town history is convoluted, the ghosts don't do much, the slasher-style killings are cheesy, and the effects range from "meh" to "worst fake blood ever" to "holy shit, I totally forgot we're filming the graveyard scene today- someone run to Hobby Lobby, buy some styrofoam, and make some gravestones stat!"


Believe me, I'm all for movies with super-fake gravestones...unless the movie is just plain boring, as is Fingerprints. The only time I sat up and really took notice of the goings-on- and I mean literally sat up- happened in the last 15 seconds of the film. After yet another twist that made zero sense, there was this shot of a car swerving all over the road (due to, you know, terror)...but the footage was sped up and I swear, it looked like something straight out of Benny fucking Hill. It was an incredibly bizarre choice by the filmmakers, and probably the highlight of the movie.

"I do declare! I feel the terror!"

Given the general suckitude of this flick, it should come as no surprise that it lingered on the shelf for a couple of years: though it was produced in 2006, it was released on DVD only yesterday.

Oh my God, I heard about this girl? Who watched a horror movie that totally stunk and she was so bored the whole time! She ate a piece of cake, though, while she watched it and the cake was good. And then spiders came out of her vagina, I swear! I know her roommate.

when it's time to choose....

I'm keepin' things eighties-style and I'm going classic for the next Film Club selection, y'all:

NEAR DARK

Let's all take in director Kathryn Bigelow's film about those cooler-than-you vampires, who just so happen to be holding on to third place in the current "Favorite Bloodsucker?" poll over yonder on the right. Annnnd, you can watch the film, write about it, then head to Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors and get your nerd on by gushing all over star Jenette Goldstein and telling her how rad she is. That's my plan, anyway!

The film: Near Dark
the due date: Monday, April 21

Film Club: Scarecrows

1988 wasn't exactly a banner year for horror movies. Franchises were cramping up as they came around the back stretch; the year saw the fourth installments of Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Howling...part deux for Fright Night, Hellraiser, and Phantasm...and Jason Voorhees was showing off his ooey, gooey face yet again in F13 Part VII. Meanwhile, original properties were beginning that dangerous slide into "We really don't take this shit seriously anymore" territory with films such as Hide and Go Shriek. It's surprising, then, that 1988 would also see the release of Scarecrows, a film that keeps things simple and aims only to terrify.


When I said "keeps it simple", I meant "No really, wicked simple": a group of ex-military folk rob Camp Pendleton, kidnap a pilot and his daughter, and force said pilot to fly them to Mexico where they can enjoy their millions as they see fit. Problem is, the greedy get greedier (isn't that always the problem?) and the double-crossings begin.

Bert (BJ Turner) decides he wants the money all to himself, tosses a grenade in the plane, and jumps. Luckily for his robber cohorts, the grenade takes about 15 minutes to actually explode- long enough for someone to toss it out of the plane. Said cohorts land the plane and begin tracking Bert and the money; problem number two is, they've all managed to land in the spookiest cornfield ever- a cornfield chock full of homicidal scarecrows who are all ready to make with the chop-chop, the poke-poke, and the stuff-stuff (isn't that always problem number two?).

That's David James Campbell on the right, flyin' that plane high on cocaine. The only films on his resume are Scarecrows and Killer Workout...clearly, he's got the best resume EVER.

And that, my friends, is pretty much that. By the time the opening credits have finished rolling, the plot is out of the way. The remaining 80-odd minutes are all about scares and atmosphere as the bad guys run around in the dark, eat raw corn, and meet the business end of various pointy things wielded by perhaps the most frightening-looking scarecrows ever committed to celluloid (and yes, I'm counting Dark Night of the Scarecrow here...while that's undoubtedly a superior film, these straw dudes fucking rocked my face off).

What I like is that writer/director William Wesley doesn't get...you know, bogged down in details and explanations here. The scarecrows simply are- they're simply alive and mean. They simply want to make more scarecrows out of their victims, simply because. Simple, simple, simple. How do the dead, freshly stuffed with straw, get up and walk around? Bah, who knows? How are the scarecrows able to mimic voices in order to lure their victims out into the darkness? Pfft, whatevs. Scarecrows is meant to be a fun, scary ride- and it is.

This film looks like it had a budget of about $1.98, but that buck-ninety-eight is stretched to its limit. I've already mentioned how great the scarecrows look (seriously, this movie would have left me super damaged if I'd seen it as a kid), but I've got to give a shout out to the kill effects as well. There's not a ton of gore, but there certainly are a ton of wince-inducing moments: Wesley knows exactly where to poke a bitch to get the maximum cringe factor from the audience. Calves are repeatedly stabbed, hands are sawed off slowly, fingers are bitten off...man, someone gets stabbed in the fucking face! I watched this one alone and I was still embarrassed about the faces I was making in reaction to the on-screen carnage.

As much as I enjoyed Scarecrows (and I really did enjoy this movie, despite its shortcomings and occasionally odd dialogue ("demonic demons", anyone?)- I think its cult following is well-deserved), though, I kind of feel like we had our moment together and that's that. I'm sure I'll bust it out again at some point in the future, but I can't say I felt that super special spark that's going to put Scarecrows on my short list of forever awesome. You know, it's kind of like you have a little too much to drink with a friend some Friday night and then Saturday morning you're all "Well, that was fun and stuff, but it's not like we're dating now or anything".

Or something like that.

Wait, what?
_____________________________

Give it up for the Film Club Coolies!

Craig Moorhead
Aphorisms and Ectoplasm
The Horror Section
Media Kitten
Celeberrimous
Meg's Boyfriends in the News
The Film School Dropout
Look Back In Anger
Mermaid Heather
Chadzilla
Evil On Two Legs
The Cemetery Scene
Fade In
Kindertrauma
Askewed Views

awesome movie poster friday- the LET'S COMPARE edition!

The images for Ju-on 2 and Ringu are seriously effing creepy.