Halloween: a time for ghosts and ghouls and other creatures of the night to take over the streets of the nation and terrorize the townsfolk into giving them sweet, delicious treats. While this may not have been the original intent, it is definitely the most beloved form of the holiday, and one which has become perverted by the teeming masses of parental group soccer moms and increasingly brain dead little children. Over time the holiday has become pussified, with trick or treating beginning before the sun even goes down and children dressing up as Johnny Depp in one form or another instead of the more appropriate dude-with-axe-in-cranium. Luckily, some people still understand the holiday and celebrate it in it’s most enjoyable form, and one of those people is writer and director of Trick ‘r Treat, Michael Dougherty.
As a regular Michael Bay apologetic, I feel I have a solid appreciation for entertainment for the sake of entertainment. A movie doesn’t have to have groundbreaking social subtext or an overreaching message, nor does it have to have an original or complicated storyline. It just needs to be fun. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland.
The vast majority of super-low-budget film and video productions tend to be horror-related, and even more often are of extremely-to-moderately low quality. Whether it be in terms of cinematography, acting, writing, or all of the above and more, most low budget fare tends to have at least one big pitfall. Such is not the case with Matthew Van Manahan’s The Book of Caleb, a super-low budget comedy reminiscent of early John Hughes fare. In fact, it’s not so much reminiscent as much as it is a parody, though much more subtle in comparison to parodies like Better Off Dead.
Whenever a movie rapist gets his wedding tackle shot/cut/eaten/torn/etc. off, people will generally say “He had it coming”. In Robocop, when Robo blows away the rapist’s junk through the woman’s skirt, people generally go “Holy shit did you just see that?!” followed up by “Damn if he didn’t have that coming…” In Sin City, when Roark Jr. gets his cherry bombs blown off by 
It would seem that as soon as I dismissed Rob Zombie as a pretentious hack, he went ahead and slapped me in the face with this little number: The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. With a barrage of Ren & Stimpy-style animation and humor, blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em creature cameos, erratic voice acting, and musical segments that do my inner perverted nerd proud, Zombie has managed to uplift my low opinion and relegate his last two projects to the Flukes Bin.