Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

As far as nine-years-later sequels go, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For… well, actually it’s pretty fucking awful, since the only other nine-years-later sequels I can think of right off star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy instead of Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba, and take as their explicit theme the evolution of culture and […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the https://www.alternateending.com/2014/09/sin-you-went-away.html blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, we return to the charming world of Basin City, where men […]

1982’s The New York Ripper is a very, very, very special motion picture: it represents the exact moment at which the great Italian horror master Lucio Fulci transformed into the hacky Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci. The transition was achieved very cleanly: outside of two scenes which could stand along any giallo of the ’70s for […]

There are spoiler-type things littered about this review; but boy, talk about a spoiler proof movie… If Eva Green never does anything with the rest of her career besides take dubious roles in doomed projects and have all the fun in the world playing her character up, down, and sideways as a giant pile of […]

The found footage horror movie, birthed by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and thrust into the big time by 2008’s Cloverfield, burned itself out rather quickly, as will happen to a genre so cheap that you need neither a good idea nor talent to whip together something which enough damn fools will trudge out to […]

Ironically, because there is no mail on U.S. Memorial Day, I didn’t get Memorial Day in time for a Memorial Day review. But what’s one day between friends, especially when the net result is celebrating the sacrifice of our brave men and women of uniform with fucking and killing, just the way they’d have wanted […]

The word of the day, boys and girls, is “ambivalent”. As in, “I feel extremely ambivalent towards Bellflower, because Bellfower is extremely ambivalent about its two main characters.” Not in the good way.* One gets the feeling – anyway, I got the feeling, and it does seem that Bellflower is something of a Rosarch test […]

The easy part first: the David Fincher-directed and Steve Zaillian-scripted The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is better across the board than 2009’s Män som hatar kvinnor, the Swedish adaptation of the same source novel by the late Stieg Larsson. The sole exception is the key role of that very same tattooed girl, where it’s […]

Every Sunday 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: the prequel/remake/reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes once again asks the age-old question of what is the […]

Mike Gibson, in contributing to the Carry On Campaign, gave me one of the richest challenges I’ve ever been privileged to receive as a writer: to explain my dislike for a generally well-regarded movie in clear, thoughtful terms, engaging with it on an honest level, finding refuge in smart argument rather than dismissive snark. Oh, […]

I know Josh Hime to be a good man, and I knew this even before he publicly gave to charity in the form of the Carry On Campaign. And yet, this good man has done something terrible to me, in punishment for what sin I do not know. Whatever it was, I am truly sorry. […]

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: nothing says “desperately garish” like a dance movie sequel titled Step Up 3D. But isn’t that exactly what we […]