1992, Day Twelve: Horror in Cinema

As I said on day one, the impetus for choosing 1992 was an episode of Screen Drafts, the movie podcast that pairs experts and enthusiasts in a competitive collaboration to come up with best-of lists. The episode in question was 1992 Horror, drafted by Joe Begos and Graham Skipper, which posited that the 90s in general was an underrated decade for horror, but 1992 in particular boasted some gems. Their final list of seven included both theatrical and straight-to-video releases, and I did my due diligence and watched everything. I listened to the podcast once more and sought out not just their top seven, but films discussed that didn't make the final list, plus a couple of other flicks.

Here's just a sampling: ten horror films theatrically released in US cinemas in 1992, nine of which were mentioned on the podcast:

Highly Recommended: 1982, Part One

Welcome to the 80s! Starting today, I'll post ten daily capsule reviews of the movies I saw for my journey through 1982: the Oscar nominees, the box office behemoths, the cult legends, and many more.

Naturally, all these retrospectives are my catching up with cinema that I've missed in my 20-odd years on the planet. What makes this first batch of movies special is that I can remember exactly when the titles became must-see selections, even if, in some cases, it took me decades to follow through.

To put it another way: besides the Oscar parallels, these are the reason I chose 1982.

Night Shift
dir: Ron Howard

scr: Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel
Recommended by: My dad's best friend and next-door neighbor Steve, who had a VHS copy

Meek morgue attendant is talked into running a brothel out of his workplace. Henry Winkler a winning leading man; he and kooky Michael Keaton get through shaky plotting, miscast Shelley Long, yo-yo progressiveness on gender, sex, and prostitution. Laughs frequent and loud.

The rest after the jump...