A review requested by John, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. The 1990 comedy-thriller monster horror film Tremors is so, so much better than you’d ever expect it to be, just based on reading up on it. The 1990s were, in retrospect, a halcyon period for whatever we want to […]
To wrap up the summer movie season, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 19: one of the specific things that the particular species of bipedal apes commonly […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: at a sufficiently far remove, Thor: Love and Thunder is ultimately based on the legends and mythology of Northern […]
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 […]
The phrase “elevated horror” gets bandied about pretty freely for something that has no concrete definition beyond “the kind of horror movies distributed by A24”. But there’s certainly something going on that deserves a word to describe it, a strain of unconnected movies that mix in horror with serious character drama. It is a very […]
A Quiet Place is the sort of film that doesn’t leave nearly enough buttons unbuttoned and loose ends unknotted that you would assume it had to have a sequel, while also leaving enough room for a sequel that it would never feel like they were forcing one out just for the sake of business. And […]
As the climax to Legendary Pictures’ “MonsterVerse” franchise, Godzilla vs Kong raises the question: was anybody in the entire world waiting for the climax to the MonsterVerse? How many people other than the rabid consumers of media news blogs, their brains addled by too much internet, know that the “MonsterVerse”, under that name, even exists? […]
Just rolling around a phrase like “Paul W.S. Anderson’s best movie” feels a little bit idiotic. Being “good” isn’t part of the point; being an enormous, ludicrous spectacle of the most unapologetically gaudy nonsense that a middle-aged video game nerd thinks is “cool” is the point. And this is why the most important Anderson text […]
Part of me thinks the best thing to do is just to point to the star rating and then tell you only exactly what I knew about Shadow in the Cloud before I sat down to watch it: it’s a World War II movie starring Chloë Grace Moretz as some manner of airwoman, it has […]
One thing that Love and Monsters cannot be accused of is a superfluity of original ideas. The film, written by Brian Duffield (of the bald-faced Alien knock-off Underwater) and Matthew Robinson (of the bald-faced everything knock-off Monster Trucks), is something of a grab bag of sci-fi and post-apocalypse narratives of every sort, especially where those three […]
Nobody who ended up in Director Jail has ever deserved it less than Joe Dante. Out of the first six features on which he received sole directorial credit – Piranha (1978), The Howling (1981), Gremlins (1984), Explorers (1985), Innerspace (1987), and The ‘Burbs (1989) – only Explorers lost money, and of the remaining five, Innerspace […]
