Editorials
2011 BLACK FRIDAY CHOPPING LIST: GAMES/TOYS & MERCH
Who knew that in the digital age of 2011 one of the highest recommended items on the Games/Toys/Merch portion of our Chopping List would be a… board game? But here it is! Don’t worry, we’ve also got your standard issue XBOX and PS3 fixes along with some truly outstanding NECA and Hot Toys collectibles. So get out that credit card, take your blood pressure medication and make the horror nut in your life very happy with something from this eclectic grab-bag.
List Price: $59.99/$49.99 (PC)
This one’s kind of a no-brainer (pun semi intended). I hear that some of the melee controls are difficult and that the story is slight, but the gameplay looks beautiful. Any game where you wander an apocalyptic tropical island looking for your wife and blasting away zombie hordes has got to be right for at least one horror fan on your holiday list.
List Price: $59.99
And if they’re looking for something a bit more intense, perhaps Rage is the ticket. Brought to you by the guys who made Doom and Quake and Bethesda (Bioshock) Rage is a whole bunch of shooting, driving and carnage. If there’s any meth heads in your family, this one comes endorsed by Jesse Pinkman of “Breaking Bad” fame. If this game can help him ease his guilty conscience it can take someone’s mind off the holidays no problem.
List Price: Various
Electric Zombie offers a pretty cool array of posters, shirts, hoodies, cinch bags etc… with a wide swath of designs. Shirts starts at around $18 bucks and hoodies only set you back $40. There’s a lot of cool stuff over there so click the link and browse around!
List Price: Various
Man, just look at these things! Any hardcore Nightmare On Elm Street fan would pretty much DIE to have these things. The attention to detail is amazing and I’m not just talking about how the figurine from Freddy’s Revenge has the fingernail knives without the glove, I’m talking about how you can accurately chart the facial makeup progression from the first three films in the detail of these dolls. “Original Freddy” looks straight out of Part 1 and “Dream Warriors Freddy” looks straight out of Part 3 and there *is* a difference.
List Price: Various
These puppies aren’t out yet, but any fan of Ash would just be happy to know that they were reserved and on the way. There’s a few more not pictured here as well, such as the Deer Head and the “Farewell To Arms” Ash. Evil Dead 2 can be watched again and again, it’s a film you pretty much never get tired of seeing. And any fan of the movie will never get tired of seeing these on their shelf.
List Price: Various
Vengeance University has a variety of cool shirts for men and women along with some posters and a few other knick-knacks. Their selection seems pretty limited at this point in the game, but if you’re looking for an itch that Electric Zombie hasn’t quite scratched you might want to peruse the aisles of Vengeance University. You might find it.
List Price: $79.99
This one comes highly recommended by a few friends and BD staffers. I’m not sure I quite understand how to describe it properly though, so I’ll let the officials do the work for me.
“After 500 years, two factions emerge from their underground cities into a new world, an earth reborn from nuclear disaster. 12 highly detailed miniatures represent the two factions which are norad military in thinking and origins. Scientists, engineers, add to their strength. Salemites, occultists working with cadavers, bringing the dead to life. Soon after emerging, these two factions meet – and it is determined that they can not live together in peace. Earth reborn offers nine scenarios that take you through missions of rescue, retrieval, escort. Through areas of labs, mansions, towns, and more. Each scenario builds upon the rules of a new chapter the game system is built like a tutorial there are core rules to start the game and each chapter offers 1-3 new rules along with a scenario that uses these new rules. The game also contains the innovative S.A.G.S. (Scenario Auto Generating System) where 2-4 players can make their own maps and mission objectives for near infinite replayabiity. Tons of replay value. For 2-4 players. Takes 1-2 hours to play.”
List Price: $219.99
You don’t necessarily have to be a fan of Robert Rodriguez’s Predators to get a kick out of these guys. Even if you know a strictly old school “Dutch, Dillon and Mac” type of guy they’re bound to crack a smile while unwrapping one of these ugly mother*ckers. These are a little on the pricy side, so check your bank account – and the fandom of the recipient – before making the leap!
List Price: $59.99/$49.99 (PC)
This is the big game of the fall and by all accounts (sexist dialogue aside) it’s pretty outstanding! If your little bro or sis was in love with Arkham Asylum last year just imagine how much fun they’ll have when they’re let out of the prison and into the city. Lots of side missions and tasks tack on hours of playing time much to the delight (or chagrin) of more OCD gamers.
List Price: Free!
This is just a neat little horror trivia game for you to keep yourself distracted while everyone else opens their presents.
List Price: $14.99-$34.99
Todd MacFarlane. “Walking Dead”. That’s a pretty great combo for fans of either (or both). There are lots of fans of the show out there and these toys, while being a little more casually minded than something than a NECA item, are great little trinkets to fill the gap in their lives between seasons.
List Price: $14.99 – $29.99
These appear to be more for the younger set. If you’ve got a brother, sister, niece or nephew who love Batman but aren’t old enough to read this site (and maybe not even old enough to not cover their eyes in The Dark Knight) then this is the way to go.
List Price: Various
Holy cow. I love the world of Bioshock. I’ve played the game twice and am often tempted to go back just to hang out in Rapture. Even the disappointing gameplay of Bioshock 2 could be compensated by being back in that environment. So if anyone in your family has one of these games on their shelf – chances are they’re a Rapture junkie and will love you forever after getting one of these.
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
You must be logged in to post a comment.