Horror Films

The only understatement connected with Bad Taste is its title. Everything else about this low-budget science-fiction/horror gross-out spoof is proudly and disgustingly excessive. Bad Taste (90 minutes, $79.98) was made two years ago in Britain. Although it won a fantasy film festival prize in Paris in 1987, it was unable to find a theatrical distributor in the United States. Home video has come to the rescue. Anyone who finds the Friday the 13th series tame and thinks Freddy Krueger has worn out his welcome can thank Magnum Entertainment for restoring repulsion to the home screen.

You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing, or so sang Bob Dylan. When it comes to measuring the mood of his team, Ray Rhodes gets by with a barometer. "He has the best barometer of any coach I've been around," defensive end William Fuller said. "He knows exactly where this team is. I think the fact that he played the game and played it fairly recently helps. He's able to get a real feel for the mood of the team. "He does a great job at that. He gets it from meetings and from watching practice.

While walking through the video store, the 7-year-old boy stopped and gawked at a display of movie tapes. "Wow," he said, "what are those?" His father said: "Never mind. You don't want to watch those movies. " "Why not?" "They are old horror movies. And they'll scare you, give you nightmares. " The boy began reading the titles aloud. "'The Wolf Man.' Wow. 'Frankenstein.' 'Dracula.' Wow. 'Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.' 'The Mummy's Tomb.' Wow, what's a mummy?"

When Michael Perilstein decided to switch careers to compose and produce film scores, he said, he found only two avenues open to him - pornography and horror. He chose the latter. With one album behind him and another about to be released, Perilstein figures he still has some work ahead of him in the trenches before he leaves the world of horror. Godzilla Vs. Your Mother, tagged "Original Film Score (From As-Yet-To-Be- Made)" movie is to be delivered to music stores this month.

He steals with animal swiftness across the overgrown garden path to the back door of the darkened mansion, where a lone light illuminates his unsuspecting victims. Neighbors' dogs start to bark. Moments later, the knife-wielding killer bursts through the door and carves his fury in blood - brutally stabbing the daughter in the face before turning the blade on her screaming mother. It was like a scene from the kind of horror movies Larry Stromberg liked to make. But this time, police said, he played the monster.

Hannibal Lecter is about to hang his next victim from a balcony overlooking a piazza in Florence, Italy. With the unctuous concern of a Saville Row tailor, he solicitously inquires: "Bowels in or out?" Since the poor fellow is gagged and in no position to answer, Lecter makes the choice for him. In one of the many gruesome moments splattered across Ridley Scott's Hannibal, Lecter guts the man with a practiced slash. The victim's intestines spill down to the square below as he dangles from the rope.

The French haven't exactly been famous for their horror films, having entered the game only in the past two decades with a crop of directors including Eric Valette ( Maléfique ), Alexandre Aja ( High Tension ), and Pascal Laugier ( House of Voices ). That is, unless you count the prolific visionary (or charlatan, depending on your point of view) Jean Rollin (1938-2010), a master of the peculiarly Gallic genre, the fantastique, and who released 52 features between 1968 and 2009.

DURING HOLLYWOOD'S glory days, the biggest stars - Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, etc. - wouldn't be caught dead in a horror movie. In 2011, however, horror is no longer a scary word for actors. Mr. James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, stars with his wife and Oscar winner Rachel Weisz in "Dream House," which opens today. That was Colin Farrell biting necks in August's "Fright Night," while Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro became the Wolfman in 2010. On TV, FX's new series "American Horror Story" will feature such names as Dylan McDermott, Jessica Lange and Frances Conroy.

Eve Brent, 81, a veteran character actress whose most recognizable role was Jane to Gordon Scott's Tarzan, died Aug. 27 in Sun Valley, Calif. Ms. Brent rebooted the character of Jane, Tarzan's civilized love interest, in the 1958 films Tarzan and the Trappers and Tarzan's Fight for Life , after Jane was left out of the two previous Tarzan movies. She said she took the part to please her son, who was then about 6. But although it raised her profile, she later concluded it had been a disastrous career move.

Tonight, four men will get together to do something they have done hundreds of times: watch horror movies. But tonight they will do it at Mount Ephraim's Harwan Theatre with about 200 other people. The friends, three from Audubon and one from Philadelphia, showed their first horror-film double features at the single-screen house two years ago. "The four of us get together and watch horror films on video," said Dan Fraga, 26, a teacher at Haddon Heights High School. "Every Halloween we used to mope and wonder why no one shows horror films on the big screen anymore.

The French haven't exactly been famous for their horror films, having entered the game only in the past two decades with a crop of directors including Eric Valette ( Maléfique ), Alexandre Aja ( High Tension ), and Pascal Laugier ( House of Voices ). That is, unless you count the prolific visionary (or charlatan, depending on your point of view) Jean Rollin (1938-2010), a master of the peculiarly Gallic genre, the fantastique, and who released 52 features between 1968 and 2009.

What follows are edited excerpts from Tirdad Derakhshani's horror-movie chat Thursday on philly.com:   Tirdad Derakhshani : Dear horror-movie aficionados, today I'd like to talk about what makes a horror movie good. What are the best horror movies ever made? I'm troubled by most mainstream critics' best-of lists because they include virtually the same films. Sure, it's critical consensus - or is it laziness? A large majority of the films listed were made after 1980, almost all after 1970.

DURING HOLLYWOOD'S glory days, the biggest stars - Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, etc. - wouldn't be caught dead in a horror movie. In 2011, however, horror is no longer a scary word for actors. Mr. James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, stars with his wife and Oscar winner Rachel Weisz in "Dream House," which opens today. That was Colin Farrell biting necks in August's "Fright Night," while Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro became the Wolfman in 2010. On TV, FX's new series "American Horror Story" will feature such names as Dylan McDermott, Jessica Lange and Frances Conroy.

Eve Brent, 81, a veteran character actress whose most recognizable role was Jane to Gordon Scott's Tarzan, died Aug. 27 in Sun Valley, Calif. Ms. Brent rebooted the character of Jane, Tarzan's civilized love interest, in the 1958 films Tarzan and the Trappers and Tarzan's Fight for Life , after Jane was left out of the two previous Tarzan movies. She said she took the part to please her son, who was then about 6. But although it raised her profile, she later concluded it had been a disastrous career move.

It promises to be as frightening as a dive into the Black Lagoon, an expedition to Skull Island, or a night in the woods at Camp Crystal Lake. And that's how people like it. The fifth annual Terror Film Festival opens Thursday, presenting three days of the creepiest independent films to be found this side of the Borgo Pass. "People like being scared," said festival director Felix Diaz, who is also a producer, writer, and performer. "There are a lot of levels and shadings, and academic intellectualism, but in the end: It makes your heart race.

Starting tonight, the big screen at the Piazza at Schmidts will be covered in red - and it won't be from a wide-angle shot of the stands at a Phillies game. The Philadelphia Underground Film Festival has partnered with IFC Midnight and its Fantastic Fest to create Monster PUFF, screening five new horror films on five October nights. The best part? It's free. Kicking the festival off at 9 tonight is "The Horde," an East Coast premiere that slashes through an apocalyptic battle of gangsters, police officers and zombies.

Hell is a teenage girl. So observes the narrator of Jennifer's Body , tongue in cheek - not to mention other bodily regions. The high school horror-comedy with a decidedly feminist bite stars Megan Fox as the traffic-stopping title character and Amanda Seyfried as her BFF, Needy. It is Needy (short for Anita) who narrates the tale of Satanism, ravishment, and revenge in girlspeak courtesy of Diablo Cody, Juno scribe. (While Cody's dialogue is endlessly repeatable, every line is delivered as though it has air quotes around it.)

Pundits worry that a whole class of new horror films, including the Saw trilogy and Hostel, is getting gorier than ever, but they're a lot funnier, too. Horro-medies make up some of the season's best DVD releases, including Black Sheep (Weinstein Co., $24.95), a gross-out and laugh-out-loud New Zealand entry about a herd of sheep who go postal and attack - and devour - their human captors. British director Jake West's low-budget marvel Evil Aliens (Image, $22.98) features alien fighters who use methane gas, um, from cows' digestive tracts to blow up invading aliens.

    At a lean - and decidedly mean - 77 minutes, the suspense-horror hybrid Them by French writer-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud is nothing short of revelatory. It's another brilliant entry in a recent mini-explosion of horror gems, including Alexandre Aja's High Tension and Christian and Kim Chapiron's Sheitan , to come out of France - a country hardly known for horror flicks. The film's big secret? It has virtually no on-screen violence. For all its intense terror, Them is more Psycho than Hostel . Moreau and Palud have ingeniously crafted a truly disturbing, suspenseful film while resorting to nary an arterial spray.