Five Star Film Club
Welcome to the Five Star Film Club, the movie-watching paradise where we only watch movies that deserve Five Stars! It’s simple, sign up for the group chat at 410-236-0646. Every month, the polls go out where we vote on the movie and the day. Whatever gets the most votes wins! Want to contribute to the Five Star options? Submit your movie below and we’ll add it into the rotation.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been adapted into film four times, but NEVER has it been eerier, more paranoid, and more disturbing than it is here. Tapping into some great ‘70s grimness, a cast of stars (Leonard Nimoy! Jeff Goldblum! Donald Sutherland!), and a sound design that gets under your skin, you’ll want to stay awake lest you get replaced with an alien pod.
The film that nearly single-handedly invented Splat-Stick horror comedy, Evil Dead 2 requires no knowledge of the first, but a willingness to watch director Sam Raimi mentally and physically torture his high school best friend. A movie so wild, the camera itself is one of the main characters!
Another 50s remake with Jeff Goldblum, this time headed by body-horror god David Cronenberg, The Fly asks a simple question: What would happen if you didn’t notice a fly came into your teleportation device with you? A surprisingly great romance anchors the grossness and it’s got an ending that Ben would describe as Butt-Wrenching.
Dawn of the Dead director George Romero’s most underrated film follows an athlete who is hit by a car in the opening seconds and paralyzed from the neck down. He’s given a helper monkey to help adjust to his new life, but what he doesn’t know is the monkey has been experimented on and is feeding on his aggression. It all ends in a deadly game of cat and mouse between a man who can’t move on his own and the creature who knows how to run the house and all of his mobility aids.
When I was 16 I decided this was the bloodiest movie ever made, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything yet to break me of that opinion. Lord of the Rings’ Peter Jackson directs a zombie comedy with kung-fu priests, ears falling into custard, a zombie baby, and a lawn-mower strapped to a chest and used as a weapon.
A crowd-pleasing creature feature, Arachnophobia is about a species of killer spiders loosed on a small community. Jeff Daniels is scared of spiders, and rightly so, but has to stand up to save his family and town. John Goodman has an iconic small role as the town exterminator.
One of the great ‘80s remakes, The Blob features some of the genre’s gnarliest special effects, a crackerjack script from Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont, and a mean streak that’s shocking even today. Leave your preconceived notions on who is safe in a horror film at home.
Spider Baby: OR The Maddest Story Ever Told is one of the wildest and best from exploitation filmmaker Jack Hill. The film hits the Old Dark House tropes of a family coming on a house populated by weirdos. Here, the weirdos are a family cursed to become more demented the older they get. The youngest daughter is a Spider Baby who traps men in webs and sucks their blood, and the rest are wilder than that!
One of the great horror anthologies by Italian master Mario Bava. Black Sabbath has three eerie stories (each eerier than the last!) and the greatest visual style any movie has ever had.
Just when you think it’s safe to go to ballet school, it turns out it’s run by witches! A violent horror fable made perfect by an incredible aesthetic and maybe the scariest theme song a movie has ever had.
Another sequel that doesn’t require you to have seen the original. Slumber Party Massacre 2 is a rock musical/slasher/party flick that must be seen to be believed. Is the killer real or just the psychic embodiment of male violence? Hard to tell, but his guitar drill he uses to kill is one of cinema’s great weapons.
When this was in theaters, director William Castle rigged up surplus airplane wing de-icing vibrators to random theater seats for a truly shocking finale. Vincent Price is researching The Tingler, a creature that grows on our spine when we’re scared. He then terrorizes a mute woman to see one in real life and takes cinema’s first LSD trip!
DO YOU WANT TO PARTY?! The love affair between zombies and punk rock have never been stronger than in this zom-horror comedy. A bunch of punks are partying in a graveyard the day that an undead body is cremated and falls back to the earth, bringing all the dead to life! A rock and roll great time!
A zombie cop movie where our hero (the hilariously-named Roger Mortis) is killed, brought back from the dead and now on the hunt to solve his own murder. Worth it just for the scene where a Chinese butcher shop comes to life and the moment where two of the undead blast each other with machine guns for what seems like forever.
And you thought your roommate was bad? A grad student learns that his roommate is experimenting with a green ooze that brings bodies back from the dead! H.P. Lovecraft with all of the jokes and naked bodies that he forgot to put in!