It just wouldn't be Halloween without watching some Simpsons Halloween specials. Granted, I haven't watched a new one in quite a few years (has anyone?), but the classic era episodes are essential Halloween watching. Here, then, are the ten best segments from the annual Halloween episodes of The Simpsons. #10: Starship Poopers Treehouse of Horror IX October 25, 1998 When Maggie loses her baby legs and sprouts a crop of writhing tentacles, it's revealed that Homer isn't her father at all. The secret truth is that Marge had been abducted and inseminated by Kang, a drooling space octopus. Kang, as the rightful babydaddy, wants to take his daughter home; Homer wants none of it. Naturally, they go on The Jerry Springer Show to settle the dispute, which leads to the following exchange: Marge: I can't believe it. Jerry Springer didn't solve our conflict. Lisa: And now he's dead. Hilarious. #9: Dial "Z" for Zombies Treehouse of Horror III October 29, 1992 Bart and Lisa, as have so many children before them, inadvertently raise the dead and unleash a horde of brain-starved zombies on Springfield. Once the undead masses threaten to overtake the town, it's up to the kids to cast the spell that will send them back to their graves--but not before ...

[rating: 0.5] Halloween H20—despite having a premise that immediately sends up red flags—turned out to be a pretty awesome movie. In fact, it is easily the best of the Halloween sequels. Sure, it discarded the continuity established in movies 4, 5 and 6, but the promise that was shown by the pretty good Halloween 4 was squandered by 5 and 6 anyway so I wasn’t too sad about that. Things came full circle, Laurie Strode became the hunter rather than the hunted and she got genuine revenge on her psychotic, bemasked brother. And it ended in such a way that it would have been a truly satisfying conclusion to the entire series. Then along came Halloween: Resurrection and fucked all that up in a big, bad way. From the very beginning, you know the movie is gonna be a bad one. The definitive end of Michael Meyers we’d seen in the previous movie was discarded and made into a big misunderstanding. Though the title suggests that Meyers might be resurrected, nothing so grand is needed; instead we’re told that he never even died and really Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) had mistakenly killed some other dude. It’s the kind of poorly executed ...

There's been a recent surge in a peculiar little niche of the horror genre, a subset you might call "torture horror." Movies like Captivity, Hostel and even the popular Saw series have made torture the new fad in fright films. When distilled to their very essence, what movies like these are trying to do is convince you you're watching a snuff film. All of them are trying to equal the granddaddy of all pretend snuff films, Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, but none of them has. There's one key difference between that original classic and the current new batch of unpleasant, endurance-test movies. The modern pictures are trying to entertain you; The Last House on the Left, on the other hand, seems to adopt the position that nobody could be entertained by this. It's job is not to amuse, but to upset. Instead of giving the audience what it wants, it points finger at the audience as they squirm more and more uncomfortably in their seats, and it fairly shouts at you: "You came here to be delighted by people being raped and tortured and brutalized and murdered? What in the fuck is wrong with you?" And that's ...

[rating: 2.5] When I saw the trailer for The Ruins, I didn’t really know what to make of it. I could tell there were going to be some people, and some peril, and probably some ruins. But just what the danger was, or how it manifested itself, or really what the movie was about...all that remained a mystery. Then I actually saw the movie and discovered, to my dismay, that it is about some kids who go to some Central American ruins and are menaced by a sentient freaking plant. It’s Indiana Jones and the Little Shop of Horrors. I’m serious, I promise. There are five characters trapped in the domain of the spooky plant. Well, that’s not strictly true; there are five people, but I would hardly call them characters. They’re more like slightly-animated cardboard cutouts, and if you’ve seen any movie ever you’ve seen them before. First are two couples, Clean-Cut b/w Blonde and Bushy-Hair b/w Brunette. Joining them is their new friend Foreigner. Together they wander around in the jungle and wind up at the titular ruins, the home of the deadly talking plant. Oh, yeah, did I not mention that it’s a talking plant? It is. Anyway, once these people find ...

[rating: 1.5] The single best way to describe Shutter, a remake of a 2004 horror film from Thailand, would be "unremarkable." In almost every way, this is an eminently forgettable movie. Our story follows Ben (Joshua Jackson) and his young bride (Rachael Taylor) as they start their new life together by moving to Japan, where a high profile photography job awaits, not to mention the vengeful ghost of a creepy girl. Apparently that's what happens in Japan when you run over a disappearing woman with your car; she follows you around looking menacing and humming nerve-jangling melodies, driving you ever closer to the brink of madness. Oh, plus she keeps showing up in photographs as a weird spectral blur or whatever, which I guess is where the movie gets its camera-related title. I say I guess because I don't actually care. The problem with a movie like this, where the story hinges on scary pictures and spirit photography, is that the whole concept just doesn't inspire fascination the way it once did. It has, after all, been over 100 years since Kodak's Brownie came on the market and put photography in the hands of the masses. Everyone takes pictures of everything all the ...

[rating: 5] If the question is "Eric, would you like to see a horror movie starring Gregory Peck?" I immediately fire back the answer of "Hells, yes!" I'll give you that answer every time. I love horror as much as every red-blooded American ought, and Greogry Peck was perhaps the very ultimate achievement in manhood. Gregory Peck knew how to be awesome at all times. He also knew that if your child was a demonspawn destined to destroy all of Christendom, the least you could do was stab him in ritualistic fashion with a series of ceremonial knives. The wisdom of Solomon, he had. It's not just the Peckinator that makes The Omen great, though. This may well be my very favorite horror movie of all time. I'm usually torn between it and Poltergeist, an odd state of affairs when you consider that neither film has any excessive gore or exposed breasts and that The Omen doesn't even have any bad words! Not an f-bomb or raunchy sex scene in sight, yet I love this picture. You know what that means right? That means it must be really good to hold my toddler-like attention span and keep me from wandering outside to ...

[rating: 2] The original blob is an interesting film to dissect. On the one hand, it's a classic. On the other, it's not any good. The lead character, Steve Andrews, is played by Steve McQueen. It's safe to say that he does "okay," but it's clear that he's only going through the proverbial motions, just as many of today's big name actors do when they're cast in a big budget picture, with a questionable script but a large paycheck to make up for it. And man, is this script questionable. Maybe no one noticed in 1958, during the age of moster movies--when Giant Gila Monsters and Creatures from 20,000 Fathoms roamed across the silver screen--that an unstoppable, all-consuming, shapeless, slow-moving blob of goo is a completely lame monster to have to thwart. Literally, the only thing that can be done to this thing is to freeze it. Oops, I ruined the ending for you. But nothing can ruin the sheer pleasure of laughing at the script, as a policeman shoots down a power line to try and electrocute the Jell-O, and another looks at it after the big climactic moment, and says simply, with no shot of the still "alive" blob, "...It didn't work." This ...

[rating: 0.5] Well. That was pretty unimpressive. I think the word that best describes The Tooth Fairy—the one word that sums up every aspect of the whole thing—is simply: Meh. Not actively bad but by no means very good, it's a completely flat and underwhelming nothing of a picture. There are images and sounds, but if you stop looking or listening somewhere in the middle you aren't going to feel like you've missed out on anything. It's meh, I tell you. Meh. The movie doesn't leave an impression of any kind on the viewer. I watched the thing twice and here is what I can remember of the plot. A family is at a house. There is a mean lady who apparently takes teeth, and if she takes them all you'll die. Or maybe even if she takes one? Then there's some neighbor lady who isn't a killer but who dresses just like the killer, why I don't know. There are some mean-spirited hillbillies, although what they add to the proceedings is beyond me. A dude with no money shows up. And I think there may also have been a ghost, perhaps? A ghost on a bike? The cast is equally enigmatic. Who ...

[rating: 0] This fourth installment in the Saw series takes the dreadfully familiar "been there, done that," sentiment that strikes all horror franchises to a level all its own. Not only are the regrettable torture scenes familiar, pointless, and, for the first time, unimaginative, but a decision was made to have the events of this film occur at the same time as the third one. This decision served absolutely no logical nor thematic purpose to the story told, but instead acts as nothing more than a gimmicky way to trump up yet another relentlessly abstract "twist" ending. Like the re-hashed torture devices, the acting in this film reaches a new low. Costas Mandylor as detective Hoffman makes you think you're watching a bad softcore porn story on Showtime rather than a multi-million dollar movie franchise. Thank god the random assortment of detective-looking actors they call a "cast" have absolutely no chemistry with one another, or else you'd spend your two hours waiting for Mandylor to inexplicably take of his pants to familiar "Baw-Chicka-Wah-Wah" music. How did they end up making a Saw IV, anyway, when The Jigsaw Killer is dead? Good question. Turns out he's far more active as a dead man than he ...

[rating: 3.5] A movie came out a few years ago that effectively put an end (temporarily, of course) to the serial killer film as we know it, because it was so unique, so original, and so clearly difficult to top, people gave up trying. What's more, it launched nearly a decade-long spat of films which belonged to a trendy offshoot of the horror genre, known as "Torture Horror." No, this film was not Saw. Hardly. It was called Seven, and long before Saw's Jigsaw murderer tried to teach us that our vices were worth dying for; before Touristas wanted us to believe that Americans deserve the wrath of the third world; and light years ahead of Hostel's feeble attempts to punish the rude and the young for sport, Seven was a film which analyzed and dissected our ills as a society, while humanizing a serial killer, his victims, his captors, and society at large. The others, beginning with Saw, stand for nothing but utter dehumanization. And of course it was only a matter of time before a fan of Seven--a film which left all the gruesome torture to our imaginations, and forced us to focus on the cause and effect of the acts rather ...