Cinefantastique Online

Peg Aloi is a freelance critic, mostly for the Boston Phoenix, and she teaches film studies. She's a reluctant academic, a passionate cinephile, and probably slightly more bad-ass than you. She is currently co-writing two books: The Glass Cauldron: The History of Witchcraft on Television, and The Celluloid Bough: Cinema in the Wake of the Occult Revival. Her film blog is The Celluloid Bough.

Directed by Michael Watkins, veteran of horror-tinged television shows like THE X-FILES, WAREHOUSE 13, MILLENNIUM and THE 4400, this story of an escaped serial killer features an impressive cast and some nicely atmospheric cinematography. Emmy nominee Gail O’Grady (NYPD Blue) plays a psychologist who aids the FBi and a team of U.S. Marshalls in hunting [...]

You’d think that most films trying to tell the story of the spectre of widespread human cloning for organs might feel like horror films, or at least like science fiction. The technology and the desire seem to be there: the will, so far, is not. But Mike Romanek’s film, based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s highly-acclaimed novel [...]

Harrowing trip into a bleak nuclear winter of the future offers a cautionary tale for today.
John Hillcoat’s film of Cormac McCarthy’s widely-praised novel (adapted for the screen by Joe Penhall) presents what may well be one of the bleakest and most terrifying stories ever told on the big screen. THE ROAD follows the harrowing post-apocalyptic journey [...]

I never really expected the remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 debut feature LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT  (itself a retelling of Bergman’s 1960 THE VIRGIN SPRING) to be successful as a remake. I did, however, expect it to be at least mildly successful as a horror film, and to some extent, it is. The cast [...]

When I saw this film in an upstate New York movie theatre – near Schenectady, in fact - there was a small audience, seven or eight people total. But two women sitting across the aisle from me insisted on talking through it, particularly during sex scenes (of which there are several). My quiet “sshing” had no [...]