Author Archive: Jason Coffman
Jason Coffman is a film writer living in Chicago. He writes reviews for Film Monthly and is a regular contributor to Fine Print Magazine (www.fineprintmag.net).
Screaming in High Heels
The 1980s was a pretty great decade to be a horror fan: after the early-decade surge in slasher films, it seems like every other week another classic horror film was hitting the big screen somewhere. And the small screen started to offer more than it ever had before thanks to the popularity of video stores [...]
My Sucky Teen Romance
Some directors start their careers in ways that tend to define the way they are talked about for quite a while. In the case of Emily Hagins, for example, it’s virtually impossible to talk about her without mentioning the fact that she completed her first feature (a zombie film entitled Pathogen) at the age of [...]
Penumbra
If the last name of Penumbra‘s co-directors– Bogliano– sounds familiar, it’s likely due to Adrián García Bogliano’s festival hit Cold Sweat, which was released earlier this year by Dark Sky films. Bogliano’s name has been on the radar of more and more horror fans since the U.S. release of Rooms for Tourists in 2006, and [...]
Lovely Molly
Eduardo Sánchez makes a bold decision at the very beginning of his new film, Lovely Molly: it opens with Molly (Gretchen Lodge) speaking into a home video camera, and from there it segues into home movie footage of Molly’s wedding to Tim (Johnny Lewis). Sánchez was one of the co-directors of the massively influential film [...]
The Moth Diaries
A film adaptation of a young adult novel about a vampire at a girls’ school must have seemed like a no-brainer proposition for the producers of The Moth Diaries. Indeed, Rachel Klein’s 2003 debut sounds tailor-made for a film adaptation in the post-Twilight market: A nameless narrator, now in her 40s, looks back on the [...]
Jersey Shore Shark Attack
It’s not too hard to imagine the pitch meeting for this one: A producer is watching Shark Week and catches a bit about the real-life 1916 “Jersey Shore Shark Attack.” It pretty much writes itself, really. SyFy has been rolling out new Creature Features pretty regularly for some time now, enlisting the aid of Roger [...]
Halloween 4 and 5 on Blu-ray
The original Halloween franchise continues its slow progress to Blu-ray with Anchor Bay’s latest set of reissues. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers were previously released on DVD by Anchor Bay and eventually released in a 2-pack together, although the new Blu-rays are sold separately. Are [...]
The Color Out of Space
H.P. Lovecraft’s works have been notoriously difficult to bring to the screen successfully, largely because Lovecraft often wrote of things “beyond description” or that human language lacked the ability to convey. Unsurprisingly, though, many independent filmmakers have taken interesting routes to get to where bigger productions couldn’t quite reach: the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s silent-film [...]
New Year’s Evil
If the idea of a fairly inept sort of holiday themed slasher film starring Pinky Tuscadero from Happy Days doesn’t appeal to you, you are probably not the target audience for New Year’s Evil. And that’s OK! For the rest of us, the MGM Limited Edition Collection has delivered another long-awaited “classic” on DVD for [...]
Knock Knock 2
If you’re wondering “When did Knock Knock come out?”, you’re not alone. Produced in 2006, the original Knock Knock is an interesting artifact of post-Saw/pre-Grindhouse horror. In a lot of ways, Knock Knock is a throwback to cheap 80s slasher films, only with that obnoxious jump-cut/strobe editing that the Saw films popularized in the mid-2000s. [...]
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