In 1986, rookie director John McNaughton was approached by a Chicago home video executive eager to cash in on the low-budget slasher craze, expecting a money-spinning slice of exploitation for his …

Is it a bird? It couldn’t be a plane; it’s way too small. Though it did travel from another galaxy. Perhaps it’s an alien, the kind of terrifying practical effects creation that w…

The slasher was my first real insight into the idea that a film doesn’t have to be particularly good to be enjoyable. I fell in love with action B-movies much earlier, particularly those glor…

It’s hard to convey just how much of an impact Pulp Fiction had on popular culture during the mid-90s. For those who were around to witness the revolution, you’ll recall a cultural phen…

By 1989, horror fans, and even Friday the 13th fanatics, were becoming a little weary with Paramount’s most dependable, low-risk franchise. After hijacking the zeitgeist with 1980’s com…

Shane Meadows is one of the most neglected filmmakers on the planet. That’s because his movies inhabit a very distinct, everyday underbelly of Great Britain, one that rarely makes it to the s…

Collateral is a dysfunctional take on a dysfunctional sub-genre. It is a buddy movie in which our mismatched duo, brought together and torn apart by fateful events, careen towards an inevitable con…

Back in 1988, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t only the premier action star in Hollywood, he was one of the biggest superstars in the entire world. Success came naturally to the industry’s …

Shane Meadows is one of the most neglected filmmakers on the planet. That’s because his movies inhabit a very distinct, everyday underbelly of Great Britain, one that rarely makes it to the s…

By 1989, horror fans, and even Friday the 13th fanatics, were becoming a little weary with Paramount’s most dependable, low-risk franchise. After hijacking the zeitgeist with 1980’s com…

Poor Billy Lynch. If Norma Bates had in fact been an oppressive, knife-wielding killer, rather than the oedipal victim of son Norman’s lurid, bloodthirsty fantasies, her name would have been …

God bless you Cannon Group; I mean, truly. I’m convinced that if a handful of the world’s greatest comedy directors were locked in a room together, years later they’d still have f…

Of all the films to come out of the hip, dysfunctional 90s, few were as enigmatic or thematically polarising as Luc Besson’s US debut Leon: The Professional, a film that treads a tenuous line…

It’s rare to see Al Pacino upstaged in any movie, and his performance as a Puerto Rican ex-con attempting to go straight is typically inspired, a controlled blend of both the fiery and unders…

One of the most striking elements of Hellraiser is that the cenobites are secondary characters. When it comes to modern horror’s most iconic figures, Pinhead is up there with the best of them…

They say everyone has a special talent. Some are artistic. Others are practical or good with their hands. Many are born athletes, possessed by the kind of unwavering ambition that’s shared by…

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is one of those movies that was simply lost on people. This was especially true for those who had caught Freddy fever during the character’s late 80s pomp, ma…

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This is the YouTube channel for VHS Revival, a Retro Movie Magazine that publishes articles, essays and features on classic movies from the 70s, 80s and 90s You can find us at vhsrevival.com and on T...

Blade Runner may lack the relentless action of some of cinema’s best-loved sci-fi hits, but what it has in abundance is beauty. There are many versions of the director’s 1982 classic, b…

Crude, wooden, repetitive, stupefyingly obvious, banal & incoherent were just some of the words used to describe horror maestro George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead back in 1978. Predictably, th…

It is somewhat ironic that one of the most nostalgic movies of the 1980s acquires its sense of sentimentality from an entirely different era. Based on Stephen King’s short story The Body, Sta…

New Line’s Cinema’s fourth instalment of the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is the one many fans remember fondest. Thirtysomethings cherish this movie like a precious childhood toy…

Those whose horror infancy occurred during the 1980s will surely consider the movie trailer voice-over a lost art form. In terms of spectacular editing, the trailer has come a long way since the he…

Jason Voorhees was still very much a character in transition back in 1982. That may sound like a spurious statement given the character’s stalk-and-slash simplicity, but he was far from the f…

A sequel that lives up to an original picture is a rare thing indeed. Even rarer is one that in some ways surpasses it, but director James Cameron managed to produce two of the most astonishing of …

Generally speaking, a good sequel retains the winning elements that endeared us to an original movie while offering something fresh and rewarding. The Karate Kid was one of the surprise hits of 198…

Blockbuster season certainly lived up to its promise in June of ’81, two of cinemas biggest and best-loved movie icons battling it out for summer supremacy, but it was the introduction of a f…

Die Hard with a Vengeance would prove something of a departure for a series that had stuck to a very particular formula. Back in 1988, the original Die Hard revolutionised the action genre with its…

Of all the sub-genres in horror’s multifaceted pantheon, few are as primal, or as intriguing, as the ‘Sex Demon’ sub-genre, which I suppose is technically a sub-sub-genre in the t…

Movies as powerful, important and enduring as John Singleton’s controversial drama Boyz N the Hood don’t come around too often. Not only was it revolutionary, portraying characters that…

The New Blood is a mutilation of a movie. Not because of Jason himself, but because of the Motion Picture Association of America, who hacked away the majority of the gore and set about castrating t…

Not only is Mad Max 2 a perfect movie, it’s one of the most influential dystopian films ever, becoming the standard bearer for not only action sequels, but action movies in general. You only …

Stallone or Schwarzenegger? Every once in a while that age-old question reemerges, but back in the late 80s/early 90s this particular subject was much more ubiquitous. Today it’s the Stathams…

How Cannon Films killed a readymade franchise in the making Golan-Globus emerged from the B-movie bonfire like a flaming phoenix. After purchasing Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey’s flailing …

They say everyone has a special talent. Some are artistic. Others are practical or good with their hands. Many are born athletes, possessed by the kind of unwavering ambition that’s shared by…

We’ve been here before, many times before, but don’t sell The Substitute short. Of all the heavy-handed, transparently racist, high school vigilante films we’ve been subjected to …

For longtime gamers, the name Tom Clancy probably evokes memories of the hugely popular Splinter Cell series, or, if you’re a little older, Rainbow Six for the original Playstation, but the n…

Freddy’s Revenge. Anyone familiar with the A Nightmare on Elm Street series will surely recognise Jack Sholder’s 1985 sequel as something of an outlier, a film that seems to divide opin…

In creative terms, the hardest movie to make is a sequel. If a sequel has been put into production it’s because its predecessor struck a note with the theatre-going public, which is typically…

The horror-through appliances sub-genre was all the rage back in the early 1980s. Once again Steven Spielberg was at the heart of it with Poltergeist, a wildly successful supernatural horror direct…