The Five Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Heard Of

#5 Jeeper Creepers 2

Why see the sequel to a mediocre movie? Because it’s surprisingly good. A bus full of basketball players and cheerleaders “blow a tire” on a remote back road in farm country and are attacked by what appears to be a monstrous superhuman scarecrow. The father of a former victim (Ray Wise) arrives with some heavy weaponry and tries to kill the creature – but will he succeed? The worse thing about many bad horror movies is the stupid and lethal choices made by the characters. Example from the 1st Jeepers Creepers: would you turn around and drive back if you saw some huge thing with wings dragging someone into a hole? Here, everyone does the smart thing to escape but sometimes smart is not enough.

#4 The Cottage

Andy Serkis is getting a lot of well-deserved acclaim for his amazing performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Here he is one of a pair of not-so-swift small time criminals who try to pull off a kidnapping for ransom. It goes badly, then horribly, then it veers off into insanity. This great riff on slasher movies, kidnapping stories, and gangster movies is fresh and inventive, chock full of great performances, and zigs when you think it will zag.

#3 Splinter

A mysterious entity gets under the skin of a motorist, who makes it to a remote Oklahoma gas station before “dying.” The victim/creature traps a young couple and an escaped criminal, who must team up to escape. They say there are no new monsters but this one is pretty close. Kudos to whatever performance artist they got to portray the “infected” – the herky-jerky broken-limbed movement is unnerving!

#2 The Descent

Six adventerous women descend into a cave in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. This is one of the scariest films of the decade, delivering top notch performances, a clever and logical script, and a slow and inexorable build-up leading to a frenzied and bloody climax. This film could have dispensed with the monster altogether and still had an excellent film depicting the women’s battle against the cave itself.

#1 Return of the Living Dead

One of the best kept secrets of the Zombie-crazy 21st Century. Written and directed by Dan O’Bannon, writer of Alien, this low-budget horror comedy perfectly straddles the line between horror and comedy. It’s scary and funny with a driving plot line that never loses speed, and a series of harsh comedic bits that keep the film dark and spicy. “Send more paramedics!”

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The Five Best Horror Comedy Movies You’ve Never Heard Of

#5 Ginger Snaps
The title says it all – Ginger and little sister Brigitte are morbid goth chicks proud to be outsiders. Ginger gets bitten by a “dog” and changes, blossoming into a hot and sexually aggressive grrrrl, leaving her sister behind. In this unusually honest and darkly humourous depiction of adolescent girlhood, Katherine Isabel is particularly charismatic portraying Ginger’s shift from sullen and sarcastic girl to fierce woman.

#4 Eight Legged Freaks
A toxic waste spill results in impossibly large spiders. Spiders, meet the townspeople. Townspeople, spiders. The whole thing moves along at a brisk pace with lot of gags and skin-crawling moments with swarming spiders. The tone is more comedic than horrific – its clear that they needed to add the comic element – to have treated the spiders seriously would have been way too much. A great cast, including a teenaged Scarlett Johansson who has never looked better and is a first-class screamer.

#3 Re-animator
Re-Animator is the king of the low-budget black humor films of the 1980s. Very loosely based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the film involves decapitations, autopsies, and the bringing back to life of mangled cats and severed heads – and that’s just the first ten minutes. Filled with classic scenes of hilarious morbidity, Re-animator is a must-see for any fan of horror comedy. Jeffrey Combs’s performance as mad scientist Herbert West lends the film much of its punch as he plows through the most shocking scenarios with a determined nonchalance – nothing will deter him from his mission of conquering death.

#2 Tremors
Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) are handymen in Perfection, Nevada, a town with a handful of people and rickety buildings – their big dream is to get the hell out of there. Perfection has worms – giant mutant worms which travel underground and pull their prey under like sharks. The only road out of the valley is bottled up by a landslide, leaving the residents trapped in with the worms. This charming little movie spawned three (weak, weaker, weakest) sequels because the original is such an excellent blend of the right actors, director, script, and overall tone. The fuel/air mixture of horror to comedy is, well, perfection.

#1 Freeway
This is a movie that really fell through the cracks. Made two years before Reese Witherspoon achieved fame with Pleasantville, she has never had a role so perfect for her unique personality. She is a sweet country girl with an edge. Kiefer Sutherland plays an oily serial killer who chooses the wrong victim and pays for it, in spades. A Red-Riding Hood variation in which the Big Bag Wolf gets his comeuppance. A sad side-note and mystery: writer-director Matthew Bright never made another good movie – what happened?

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Prepare Your Child For a Casting Call For Disney Channel

In the last decade or so, countless kid stars have come out of the Disney franchise, and so it follows that more parents than ever before are bringing their children to any available casting call for the Disney Channel. Fortunately, the Disney Channel produces a variety of TV shows and movies, and the producers are on constant lookout for fresh faces and talent of all ages and backgrounds for a wide assortment of roles. The network has calls for series regulars, recurring roles, guest stars and extras.

Landing any role on a Disney show is a huge success. The actor’s audience is amplified to millions worldwide. Because of this popularity, the competition for parts can be intense. For a child auditioning, acting training, dedication, maturity and a high level of passion and charisma are a must in order to succeed in this coveted field.

The first step for anyone who wants to be involved in professional acting is to get some experience.

Enrollment in local theater arts programs is a great first step for a child who wants to gain some initial training. Theater groups, improvisation and acting workshops and classes, and any one-on-one training they can get are the best way to introduce the field to a child and are great experience to have if they wish to continue and pursue a Disney role.

If your child is interested in trying out, you will need to get a resume and cover letter made, as well as a portfolio of pictures including headshots. The more certified everything looks, the better impression it will make on casting directors. So it is worth it to pay for professional photographers and cover letters writers who know what the directors are looking for. Clothing worn in the pictures as well as on the actual audition day should be age-appropriate and should showcase the child’s personality.

The next step will be to help your child get ready for the role for which they are trying out. Proper preparation should include study of the story and research into the character, if available, as well as the one minute comedic monologue that Disney Channel asks all actors to prepare. If your child has an acting coach or trainer, they should make sure to work on this monologue with them prior to the audition with a stopwatch at hand.

The casting directors see hundreds of children per day, and the last thing you want is to have the one audition that threw off their carefully planned schedule. This also means punctuality is crucial, so plan on arriving at least 15 minutes early. The audition might also include improvisational exercises or actually reading from a script, all of which can be prepared for by practice and participation in local theater groups.

Sometimes the casting directors are looking for something very specific, often even a certain “look”. If your child does not get the role, do not let them be discouraged because it may have been out of both of your hands. This should be a fun, positive experience for you and your child.

The Disney folks at the casting call will be sure to create an engaging, friendly and relaxed atmosphere, so allow your child to settle into that frame of mind in order to relieve any stress or anxiety. Of course, a casting call for Disney Channel is not only limited to children’s roles. For adults who are auditioning, the process is very much the same, as are the tips and guidelines, though more experience may be required.

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