Best Horror Film of 1990 (part 15 of a series)

Voted Braindead, but Tremors was a close runner-up.

OK - IMDB sucks - I just realized I omitted It, Misery, and The Exorcist III. Please consider these all write-ins.

no one was going to vote for "It" anyway

a bunch of these I haven't seen. Is Brain Dead the Jackson flick...? cuz that is all-time lolz.

Bride of Reanimator also solid

Brain Dead is indeed the Jackson one. A budget zom-com masterpiece.

Okay, WTF at Fertilize The Blaspheming Bombshell? IMDB has a good snarky review: Sheila Caan is menaced by Satan worshipers on her journey from Brooklyn to Las Vegas. In an effort to find out what happened to her twin sister, she undergoes many treacherous journeys, a number of Satanist slayings, and a number of showers.

Haven't seen most of these; my memory is groaning at Basket Case 2 and TCM3. I liked the photography and atmosphere of The Reflecting Skin. Yeah, Brain Dead = Dead Alive in the US, and it is over the top gory and hilarious.

Brain Dead looks like a clear front-runner here but there are some great choices here! Tremors is great. Arachnophobia basically created and broke the mold for modern horror-comedies. I am a huge fan of Nightbreed. Gremlins II, unlike the vast majority of horror sequels, is pretty damn good... and even the movies that I assume (cause I haven't seen them) are downright terrible have great names!

like:
Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell -- I am very surprised this isn't a band name
Grim Prairie Tales: Hit the Trail… to Terror -- I have no idea what this is but the name made me LOL so hard.

Okay, wait, no, Peter Jackson's was 1992. There's a 1990 Brain Dead starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton.

shit, wrong Brain Dead. sorry Tremors!

Oh I was confused as well...

Folks, this is the Brain Dead on the poll:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514Y0JR6WHL._SS500_.jpg

Peter Jackson's one is great I have no idea about this... eh, film.

uh

meant to embed that image:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514Y0JR6WHL._SS500_.jpg

lol

at least now we know where they got the idea for "Face/Off" from

Aw what? That sucks about BRain Dead - I already voted for it. Was it really as late as '92 though?

holy shit there are a lot of great movies on this list

really want to vote for "the reflecting skin" but as a dude who keeps being all snooty about what is and isnt horror im not sure i can. have to think it over a bit.

oh shit tho, Hardware!

Basket Case 2
Bride of Re-Animator
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Hardware
Maniac Cop 2
Night of the Living Dead
Nightbreed
The Reflecting Skin
Tremors

would consider any of these as worthy

also this is a good reminder that i havent gotten around to singapore sling or luther the geek yet

Mister Frost is fucking overrated garbage, and i would like to know more about Nightmare Concert (A Cat in the Brain) just because

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514Y0JR6WHL._SS500_.jpg

wow... i had no idea pullman & paxton did a movie together!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cat_in_the_Brain

sadly, this seems to not actually about a brain-eating cat that forces its victims to listen to bad music

I like the first Basket Case a lot; low-budget, creative and a bit cartoonish horror. I really dislike the sequel (what I remember of it) for going way overboard on the cartoon aspects, like some sort of berserk Muppet show:
http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh310/yodelagogo/BasketCase25.jpg

thanks for extending the poll time, darin!

seems like a bad year for horror tho, I don't think there's one film on this list I've seen that I'd want to see again, besides the reflecting skin and I'm with jjjusten on the "not horror" thing there

maybe I need to finally see tremors

x-post

obv haven't seen everything on this list, but really can't agree that this was a great or even gd year for horror movies. i like the argento half of Two Evil Eyes, but the romero section sucks (the start of his long long decline.) the savini NOTLD is passable, Tom Toles is great in it, but o/w meh. bride of reanimator, childs play 2, texas chainsaw massacre 3 and gremlins 2 are all mediocre sequels (and is the latter REALLY a horror movie? don't remember anything scary abt it.) haven't seen it, but am guessing that the Xtro sequel isn't v gd either. Nightbreed is incoherent balls. so, voted for Tremors by default, even tho it's as much a 50s sf pastiche as it is a straight-forward horror flick. can't deny the strength of the ward-bacon partnership, tho.

Tremors and Arachnophobia are b-movie gold. Gremlins 2 mines b-movie gold. (Underrated) Night of the Living Dead remake remakes b-movie gold. Hardware is just a great b-movie.

The Guardian - is that the forgotten Friedkin about an evil tree fairy?

yup

I would have gone with Misery here, had I been smart enough to include it. That said, this is Tremors vs. Arachnophobia for me.

I'd have voted for It over Misery.

lol Eric, must you always ruin my unsubstantiated assertions

Haha I hope something artsy fartsy wins like The Reflecting Skin or Begotten (which I voted for).

John Waters LOVES Tremors iirc and fwiw.

if TV movies are included these lists will get crazy

not that I wouldn't mind voting for don't be afraid of the dark or gargoyles or dark night of the scarecrow or bad ronald but y'know

I know it's got its fanbase but man did I hate begotten

I would have def. voted for Misery too, but I think the biggest problem is that there are now like 4 votes for a shitty movie that went back in time and stole the title of an awesome movie.

Basket Case 2 and 3 are both golden, I am voting for some sort of berserk Muppet Show.

Reflecting Skin horror/horrific enough for my vote. FYI, the new German Blu-ray looks and sounds amazing.
may do my thing later, may not. i could write reams about Singapore Sling and Brain Dead alone. and i just happened to watch The Suckling.

plz do yr thing later

people are srsly sleeping on Hardware altho considering it was out of print forever that isnt too surprpising i guess.

Yeah, I haven't seen it, but understand the Bill Pullman Brain Dead is criminally underrated.

I know it's got its fanbase but man did I hate begotten

edward III you are my man and it hurts me to hit the sb on you

I mean like physically hurts me to hit the keyboard as hard as that post made me hit it lol

xpost (Director Adam Simon pulled together American Nightmare, one of the better horror versions of Raging Bulls, Easy Riders.)

you can subtract my vote for Brain Dead, then

fuggit...

Baby Blood - herald to the extreme French horrors of the '00s, and a damn fine (and sick) entry in its own right. ageless parasite takes over a woman's womb, forcing her to kill to satisfy its survivalist bloodthirst. never saw the semi-sequel, Lady Blood.

Bloodmoon - forced coitus interruptus committed with barbed wire nooses. shitty Aussie slasher.

Brain Dead - wonderful rubber-reality romp from an old Charles Beaumont script. the actors and inventive low-budget direction make it sing.

The Death King - Jörg Buttgereit's plotless anthology of suicide vignettes, tied together with footage of a progressively putrefying corpse and of an overgrown urban cemetery. may not sound like much, but it's compelling.

Demon Wind - kinda fun late Evil Dead rip-off with one or two cool ideas and lots of chunky, slurply slime.

Demonia - a gaggle of possessed nuns, Fulci style. even i can't defend this dreck.

Disturbed - if this is the Malcolm McDowell/Pamela Gidley one, it's a diverting asylum-set "who's the crazy, the doc or the pt?" potboiler.

Evil Spirits - if you're looking to let at a boarding house run by Karen Black and tended by Michael Berryman, don't. one of many forgettable quickies helmed by Gary Graver. as a cinematographer, more than competent. as a director, not so much.

Fear - the Ally Sheedy one? pretty good psychic-hunts-psycho chiller, like a dry run for 'Medium'. or something.

Frankenstein Unbound - Roger Corman's fascinating, frustrating return to the chair. grisly sci-fi spun around Shelley's tale, sometimes played seriously, sometimes campy as hell. ends with a laser-tag showdown in Antarctica.

The Guardian - Druid nanny sacrifices her yuppie parents' children to trees. had potential, but Wm. Friedkin tries to play it so straight that it just comes off as asinine.

Graveyard Shift - bad story, worse movie.

Grim Prairie Tales - horror western kitchen-sink omnibus covers Native American curses, racism, crude animation, and (most memorably) gynophobia. a grizzled James Earl Jones presides. i love this movie.

Hardware - Richard Stanley's dumb, visually visionary sci-fi allegory. no flesh will be spared. mind the closing doors.

Lisa - effective PG-13 thrills in an "I Saw What You Did and I Know Who You Are" vein. played on Lifetime a lot. that tells you a lot.

Luther the Geek - memorably daffy tale of a clucking psychopath who tears out throats with his metal dentures. not good, but not as bad as it could have been. and it could have been baaaaaaaaaaaaad.

Mirror Mirror -

Night of the Living Dead - undervalued remake. perfectly fine, for what it is.

Nightmare Concert (A Cat in the Brain) - i'll have to pick up from here later. too much to say about Fulci's gonzo exegesis on the pathology of film making.

Nightmare Concert (A Cat in the Brain) - i'll have to pick up from here later. too much to say about Fulci's gonzo exegesis on the pathology of film making.

awesome - was starting to worry that nobody here had seen this one!

ie I'm very curious spill the dirt. easily the funniest title in this list

I know it's got its fanbase but man did I hate begotten

edward III you are my man and it hurts me to hit the sb on you

I mean like physically hurts me to hit the keyboard as hard as that post made me hit it lol

― aerosmith: the acid house years (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, November 22, 2010 4:45 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

u know we are brothers in darkness and I dunno if years of anticipation built up too much anticipation and I know this a weird reaction to have but the acting in this sucked. like never once did I actually believe that that was god was committing suicide.

movie makes me so apoplectic I can't even type sense no more

We've got Cat In The Brain waiting to be viewed. Will try to watch it before this poll ends.

I saw hardware in the theaters. if you're gonna rip off the terminator, alien, plus every post-apocalypse movie ever you better bring more to the table than a barely-plotted exercise in set design. even a lemmy kilmister cameo couldn't save this thing. humorless and devoid of any surprises whatsoever. galaxy of terror was more entertaining. at least it wore its dopiness on its sleeve.

even i can't defend this dreck.

^ ok this made me lol

Mirror Mirror - demonic looking glass gives a high-school goth the upper hand against her teenage tormentors. modest chills and a fun cast (Charlie, Yvonne de Carlo, Karen Black, Stephen Toblowsky).

Pale Blood - a serial killer has been pinning his crimes on a real L.A. vampire, who just wants to sleep through the day (in a designer zip-up portable coffin) in peace. features a very enthusiastic Wings Hauser, Sybil Danning, and a sweet Agent Orange soundtrack.

Playroom - wastes gobs of great, authentic Balkan monastery atmosphere on a shoddy stop-motion menace, an undead child prince fond of murder and torture games. file under "i can't believe this isn't a Full Moon Production."

Pledge Night - Joey Belladonna is Acid Sid, killed 30 years ago in a frat prank gone awry and back to torment the legacy and the new pledges. deserves a place in the homoerotic horror HOF alongside ANOES2 and everything directed by David DeCoteau.

Satan's Princess - wicked-hot Lydie Denier made me a man, but that's the best i can say for Bert I. Gordon's stupefyingly incoherent possession yarn.

Shadowzone - speaking of Full Moon... stable standout JS Cardone (do try to see his pre-FM mini-movie, The Slayer) concocts a shaggy story about NASA dream research which is transparently an excuse to place a naked ingenue in a glass chamber. Louise Fletcher and James Hong give their all, but this is a mess.

Singapore Sling - twisted Greek reimagining of Laura as Thundercrack!. exquisitely filmed, thoroughly nauseating, very entertaining if approached as a jet-black comedy of bad manners.

The Suckling - sub-Troma indie abortion about... an aborted fetus back for revenge. lacks the lowbrow wit needed to make it work (compare with Monsturd, Retardead, Poultrygeist, etc.) so it's just unpleasant and tacky.

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie - solid anthology. a lot of fun, but no one will confuse it for a great horror movie.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 - Leatherface? Jeff Burr tried, he did. something's just ... off.

Two Evil Eyes - Romero's stodgy, soapy "M. Valdemar" totally torpedoes this. a third evil eye might have been salvaged it.

The Witches - Nic Roeg takes command of Jim Henson's workshop, adapts Roald Dahl, makes magic. Anjelica Huston is a sight, and Dahl's misanthropy shines through, but this is too heartfelt and toothless to be horror.

Whispers - this is why so few films are made from Dean R. Koontz novels.

Xtro II: The Second Encounter - worth watching with the director's commentary for all the dirt on Jan-Michael Vincent, who was apparently in his coked-out heyday and a real handful on the set.

CITB gets its own post.

i'm with Edward. HATE The Begotten with a teethgrinding passion. E. Elias Merhige may be the most pretentious individual who ever drew air. i doubt a more "accurate" HD transfer of this B&W torture apparatus' artfully engineered grain will reveal its alleged genius, and i'm pretty sure i'm unwilling to sit through it again, ever.

sounds like a shitty goth-version of Jodorowsky

never heard of it before

people are crazy if they think this was a bad year! i mean, i might have said so off the top of my head before reading this list, but holy shit, i apparently love tons of 1990-vintage horror flicks.

basket case 2 - not a patch on the first, okay, but i love the goofily ambitious monster makeup and the shift to comedy/melodrama. plus it's still got plenty of the weirdo/sleazeball spirit that drove the original.

begotten - i'd never say i like begotten, but for "experimental" art/horror mindfuckery, you could do a hell of a lot worse. leaves a mark, that's for sure.

brain dead - b-grade sci-fi horror as existential thriller, a genre i'm generally a sucker for. basically just cod surrealism on an indie horror budget, but the story that keeps you guessing, and that's good enough for me. not great, but fun.

bride of re-animator - yuzna pees on the legacy a bit, but the splatter's top notch, and it's got an entertainingly hysterical, go-for-broke quality. happy just to see jeffery combs sweat bullets and chew scenery, tbh.

the death king (der todesking) - super grim and depressing german (surprise) art film about the joys of suicide from nekromantik auteur jorg buttgereit. repulsive, but oddly mournful and resonant. not recommended, but successful on its own terms and difficult to shake off.

demonia - tedious late fulci flick about a haunted/possessed archaeological site. boring & badly acted, but i watched it on mushrooms, so everything looked all nice and glowy. features at least two classic gore scenes, including one aided and abetted by trees that quite took me by surprise (again, blame the shrooms).

frankenstein unbound (aka roger corman's frankenstein) - saw this but don't remember it at all, other than that i was underwhelmed. wanna see it again, though. gots john hurt and raul julia!

gremlins 2: the new batch - totally ridiculous and hard to call a horror movie by any stretch, but funny, inventive, silly, self-mocking and just plain bizarre. more kid's movies should be so gleefully unhinged.

hardware - awesome british indie sci-fi about killer technology dug from the desert sands after the fall of modern civilization. tense, gory and strangely psychedelic, with plenty of satirical bite and nifty character bits from the likes of lemmy kilmister & iggy pop.

mister frost - oddball thriller starring jeff goldblum as a killer who just might be the devil himself. spends too much time ruminating about the "reality of evil" in an age of scientific unbelief and so on, but goldblum's always a pleasure to watch. he's at least as good here as he was in the fly.

nightbreed - loved clive barker's early short stories, but he's proved himself a pretty lousy filmmaker. nightbreed is at least as much dark fantasy as it is proper horror and about as goofy & pretentious as you'd imagine, but the monsters are great and you do get a super creepy supporting turn from david cronenberg as a less-than-reassuring psychiatrist.

a cat in the brain - more late fulci, better than demonia, yet worse. fulci plays himself, more or less: a horror director plunged into scenes from his own films and subsequently losing his mind. he's pretty good, too! supposedly pieced together in large part from other films (most of them fulci's), but i don't mind cuz i haven't seen most of them. incoherent, cheap and sloppy, but still a damn good time and gruesome as all bloody hell.

the reflecting skin - probably the most well-remembered art/horror piece here, a lynch-like fable about adult sin and mortality intruding on a child's world in smalltown america. rather downbeat and grisly, but still quite beautiful for that. would love to see it again.

shadowzone - entertaining z-movie sci-fi from full moon, basically an alien ripoff set in an underground military base (as i recall). good monster, good gore, and some nice suspense and scares. lowbrow to be sure, but a lot of fun: good halloween popcorn fodder.

singapore sling - BEST MOVIE BEST MOVIE BEST MOVIE!!! greek black and white film that presents itself as a sequel (of sorts) to otto preminger's laura. sometime in the late 40s, a grievously wounded detective turns up on the doorstep of two deranged women who then decide to "care" for him. madness ensues. gorgeous, pornographic, hilarious and utterly, utterly depraved. a personal favorite that (as they say) must be seen to believed. words cannot begin to do it justice. absolutely brilliant film. absolutely not a horror movie, though.

the suckling - always wanted to see this, never have. an abortion clinic is terrorized by a mutated aborted fetus that rises out of the sewers beneath it. allegedly.

tremors - giant killer worms. fun sci-fi thriller about which i remember very little. didn't like it as much as most critics at the time.

two evil eyes - split movie presenting two edgar allan poe stories, one by dario argento, the other by george a romero. the argento piece is pretty great, the romero segment not so much. tom savini's gore effects in argento's "black cat" are unforgettable, worth the price of admission on their own. plus harvey keitel losing his shit in a highly entertaining fashion. car-harm angle is a bummer, even though it's all special effects.

the witches - excellent nicholas roeg adaptation of roal'd dahl's children's novel. fun for kids and scary enough, but retains the cruel wit and misanthropy that make dahl so entertaining for grown-ups. strong characters and performances all around, and anjelica huston is fantastic as the main villain. on the con side, it's arguably misogynist as hell, the ending is disappointing.

Shadowzone - speaking of Full Moon... stable standout JS Cardone (do try to see his pre-FM mini-movie, The Slayer) concocts a shaggy story about NASA dream research which is transparently an excuse to place a naked ingenue in a glass chamber. Louise Fletcher and James Hong give their all, but this is a mess.

lol, had totally forgotten that bit. +1 to shadowzone, lifeforce style.

lol wasn't Louise Fletcher already in some other dream-research movie

voted for brain dead by mistake apparently. subtract that vote and give it to gremlins 2.

brainstorm

xp

^^^knew it was something like that but I always confuse the title with Mindscan

or is it Mindwarp... Dreamscape? shit

she was in virtuosity fwiw

lots of good stuff here, but i can't bring myself to vote for anything that isn't SINGAPORE SLING

Mindwarp = Fangoria-funded sci-fi splatter with Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm
Dreamscape = Dennis Quaid, Eddie Albert, Max von Sydow. patricidal slumber serpents, Presidential dreams of Nuclear holocaust, etc.

but is SS really a horror film? it's a rude art film.

singapore sling is absolutely not a horror film. but i can't imagine i'll get many more opportunities to vote for it on ILX, and i like it better than anything else on here. favorite more traditional horror movie would be brain dead or cat in the brain (but i haven't seen either in ages).

fairn 'uff.

or hardware maybe, or the reflecting skin? remember all these films very fondly, but it's been nearly 20 years for most of them. clearly need to revisit 1990.

xxp - shit i still need to watch Singapore Sling

hell yeah you do! and having done so you may wonder where i get off loving such a thing when i regularly trash other movies for being misogynist and/or torture-happy, but, well... yeah. it's just that good.

u know we are brothers in darkness and I dunno if years of anticipation built up too much anticipation and I know this a weird reaction to have but the acting in this sucked. like never once did I actually believe that that was god was committing suicide.

my deal is I had either never heard of it or had heard & totally forgotten but I rented it on VHS about five years ago completely blind, pretty much no idea what it was going to be like. going into it like that -- man oh man did it ever impress. it had nothing to live up to. it was just a video I rented from the indie section of the store down the street.

when begotten first played in the city, I read the village voice reviews talking about how an audience member at a screening ran up to the projection booth and starting pounding on the door for them to turn it off (insert your own joke here). it sounded *so* up my alley, some freefloating mysterious overpowering psychically disturbing freakout. when I finally saw it 10 years later, it just didn't have the gravitas to do any real damage, felt like I was watching some interminable student film with two ideas. maybe I wasn't stoned enough?

While Tremors was a childhood favorite and really cheesy and funny, I have to vote for the movie with pre-adolescent crush Phoebe Cates in it out of force of habit.

Plus Hulk Hogan threatens to kick ass when the Gremlins stop the movie in a meta joke.

And it's a meta joke that they alter appropriately for the home video version!

Bills both Pullman and Paxton? That is like b-movie version of those gangster flicks that come around every so often which pit De Niro against Pacino (or situate them as buddies, etc.).

^^that's happened a grand total of twice fwiw

twice is still enough for a workable analogy, godammit

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

This poll is the equivalent of an Asylum Films box cover... tricksy!

You mean The Asylum, of Transmorphers and Paranormal Entity shame? Yeah... I'd be interested in a hand count of all who voted for BD thinking it was Jackson's film. An adustment still might not boost The Reflecting Skin to its rightful place at the top - Gremlins 2???? - but i suspect that it would be more than a mere academic exercise.

lol yeah, i'd be surprised if 9 people voting here had seen the brain dead in question. more so that they'd vote for it if they had.

i wrongly voted bd and would've voted gremlins 2 had i caught my error in time.

Man srsly everybody should see the reflecting skin if they havent. (wait did I already say that upthread?)

man, how did frankenhooker not make it onto this list?!? just watched it for the first time since the early 90s and it holds up beautifully. probably henenlotter's best, this side of the OG basket case. huge debt to stuart gordon (and especially to re-animator) in the story, protagonist and cinematography, but that's high praise in my book. plus great "old bad new york" color and character, something henenlotter clearly knows and loves. flat brilliant, everything i want a trashy horror movie to be.

I wanna also wax poetic about Frankenhooker but I need to go to bed.

It's fucking fantastic tho.

Basket Case 2 = not bad at all! well there is some really bad acting, I guess, but that only makes certain characters' deaths that much more enjoyable. not really a patch on the first one but still gets in some HUGE wtf moments in the last half hour with the ***SPOILERS*** homonculus sex, the dreaded "snappin pussy", and the final stitching scene

the dreaded "snappin pussy

I would ask you to elaborate on this but I'm afraid you would

yikes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdwrvqBboHg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSDn5xOJkK8

You know, reviews of the 1990 Brain Dead make it sound awesome...

it is

Definitely