Cinemassacre's Monster Madness is a web review series hosted by James Rolfe. One of his most popular and longest-lasting projects, it started in 2007 and has been a yearly tradition ever since.
Driven by his love of horror and his love of cinema, James reviews one horror film every day in October. For the show's very first year, it was conceived as a horror history overview, and it then branched out into different sub-themes for subsequent years. Later years have undergone multiple format changes as well, although the general horror focus has remained consistent.
For the first several years, the videos were hosted exclusively on James's website, Cinemassacre.com
. Over time, as James and Cinemassacre's YouTube presence began to grow more and more, new Monster Madness episodes were shared on YouTube as well, which took over as the main hosting platform for a while. In October 2021, however, a new version of the Cinemassacre site premiered, with the show's newest season returning to being hosted exclusively there.
Cinemassacre's Monster Madness provides examples of:
- Gratuitous Rape: James criticized both Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (the producer's cut), and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed for including these in it. His reasoning is as follows:
- Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers involves Michael forcibly raping his teenage niece and impregnating her. Not only does it seem so wrong on so many levels, but it's entirely unnecessary. Michael is out to kill his remaining family. Now he's reproducing to make more family to kill? This is one of the main reasons why James blasted the producer's cut, despite it being the popular choice over the theatrical cut. He considers the latter to be more entertaining, whereas the former is just too messed up to justify its existence.
- Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was a case of Executive Meddling. Frankenstein decided to rape the beautiful inn keeper spontaneously. This had no place in the film at all other than make Frankenstein out to be a more horrible human being, which this and previous films did a great job of already. The meddling part came from the producers wanting the rape scene added in just for sex appeal, despite protests from Peter Cushing and Terence Fisher, and the scene being nowhere at all in the original script. James says it best:"It's not sexy, it's disturbing!"
- Overly Narrow Superlative: When reviewing an old VHS copy of Assignment Terror (also known as Dracula vs. Frankenstein), James anti-climatically concludes that it's the worst commercially manufactured VHS tape to ever feature Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy.
- Title Scream: Comes in many variations, starting with Rolfe simply stating the name in the first iteration of the show, and having a much hammier variant in later years with "It's Cinemassacre's Mmmonster Maaaaadneeesss!". The Camp Cult edition of the show even features fan versions of it.
