Once upon a time, before the luxury of creepy-content-specific channels or hi-tech streaming services preloaded with an endless buffet of monsters and maniacs; heck, even before those fancy video stores were willing to trade you one night of you favorite BetaMax beasties for a bit of your hard-earned cash—once upon a time, if you were a horror fan, there was only one way to get your weekly fix. Come Friday or Saturday—or hell or high water—you had a running date with a ghoulish guru of gore somewhere amidst the landscape of local network affiliates.
You had the late night horror show.
Filmed on shoestring budgets with sets that looked like they were spliced together from the junior high’s fall production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, these silly sideshows were more sophomoric than scary, but they were often more enjoyable than the fearfests they were showing. The hosts—from Sir Cecil Creape to Dr. Gruesome to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark—all became local (and sometimes, in Elvira’s case) international legends. But they all had a few things in common: a love for the genre; a passion to push it to the mainstream and a commitment to never take themselves too seriously.
As such, welcome to ScreamFish; the latest imprint of our humble little movie review site. Here, on Fridays, we will explore all things horrific and just like those old late night shows, we’ll cover the shock and the schlock. We won’t shy away from the blood and guts, but we’ll try to get the meat of what lies beneath the squishy epidermis of each film and see if we can mine a little faith-based commentary from the gooey innards.
And hopefully we’ll have a few laughs along the way.
So, without further ado, welcome to ScreamFish.
Come join us…if you dare.
For our maiden voyage into mayhem, we’ll examine that bastion of late night royalty, Re-Animator. A terrifying Little Train That Could, Re-Animator’s tasty blend of creepy and kooky have turned it into a decades-old pop culture franchise that shows no sign of flatlining. It’s a gaudy commentary on man’s eternal struggles with mortality, the perils of ambition and the age-old conundrum of dismembered cephalic sarcasm. And as Dr. Herbert West soon learns, sometimes to get ahead, you have to take one.
Grab your lab coats kids; this could get messy.
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