Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

“Hello, my friends. I want to put on record that the flic out there using the word Hellraiser IS NO FUCKIN’ CHILD OF MINE! I have NOTHING to do with the fuckin’ thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.” -Clive Barker, who […]

To begin with, I find the very title of DC League of Super-Pets unpleasantly provocative. Not the League of Super-Pets part; that’s mostly just describing the content, though I might wonder why the film bothered to so subtly rename the comic book Legion of Super-Pets. Probably because Warner Bros. assumed (and with reason) that movie […]

Hellraiser: Hellworld was made during the second half of the same production block as Hellraiser: Deader, during the final weeks of 2002; the two shoots shared virtually an entirely identical production crew, working in both cases underneath director Rick Bota (the one significant change is that Deader cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile was replaced on Hellworld […]

Whatever else is true of it, Hellraiser: Deader has an extremely dumb title. Formally speaking, “deader” is correct English, but it’s not a word that I think anybody uses except in those moments when it is useful to compare things to doornails. And in the context of a horror movie sequel, it’s not just awkward, […]

Sometimes, the peculiar alchemy of what makes a film click with an audience can never be fully understood, but merely accepted as what is, part of the ineffable magic of the movies. This is not the case with the six Leprechaun films that were released between 1993 and 2003. Every person who’s ever seen even […]

Jurassic World Dominion fucks up absolutely everything it’s possible to fuck up. It even fucks up how to put a colon in its own title. To my knowledge, the oldest film to have staged a scene of a dinosaur attacking a human is Willis O’Brien’s partially-lost The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, from 1918. So by […]

Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death and Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose were shot at the same time by the same group of people. There should be no reason for them to be as far apart in quality as they are, and yet: Angel of Death is no great shakes, but it’s basically watchable as a bargain-basement […]

Thirteen is a pretty cool number of entries for a horror franchise to arrive at: it is the spooky number, and thus very auspicious. And when the Witchcraft movies became the very first horror series ever to arrive at its thirteenth entry in 2008, with Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen, the series minders seemed […]

If you, like me, are of the opinion that there’s nothing more enervating to watch in 2020s American filmmaking than a strictly formulaic comic book movie, Morbius has a surprise for you. It manages to do something that I’m a bit surprised it’s possible for a film made for this much money and with this […]

So here we are, lucky number 13 – Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen, to be precise. And executive producer Jerry Pfeifer (the only common link between all thirteen of those films) and the good people at Vista Street Entertainment pulled out all the stops to celebrate hitting that milestone, having become the first (and […]

It’s impressive, in its way: 2022 managed to produce a worse wide-release film than the whole of 2021 on literally its very first try. The 355, the first movie of the new year, makes virtually no right choices, and arguably started that habit before pre-production, before development even, when 355 star/producer Jessica Chastain and director […]

This review addresses, with a fairly free hand, plot elements that I, for one, wouldn’t really consider to be “spoilers” for Spider-Man: No Way Home, but I imagine somebody hoping to enter the film wholly pure and ready for surprises would be outraged to learn some of these things. Proceed accordingly. For a movie that represents […]