Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

For its first hour or so, Holy Spider, the third feature from Iranian-born Danish expat Ali Abbasi (Border), depicts misogynistic violence along two parallel tracks. One narrative thread follows a female journalist, Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), who’s just arrived in Mashhad, located at the northeast corner of Iran, to report on a series of murders […]

Serial killer movies and TV shows are common as dirt, and most of the serial killers within them feel a bit commonplace as well: you’ve got your brutish animal menace, you’ve got your erudite reptilian wits, you’ve got your soft-spoken weirdo with an unnerving stare. There aren’t all that many movie serial killers who actually […]

A review requested by Andrew, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! Officially, the 2009 independent psychological sci-fi thriller After Last Season cost $5 million dollars, which is both a […]

You may think that this is a straight rip-off of American Psycho, and in some ways you may be right. But this is a woman’s tale. We women are having a moment right now, and this is what we call in Hollywood, an “elevated story concept,” AKA, “the same, but different.” So shut the fuck […]

John Lee Hancock wrote the first draft of the script for The Little Things in 1993 (for Steven Spielberg, an unbelievably counterintuitive choice for this grim, gloomy crime thriller), and it’s a great pity that we’ll never know what exactly went into that first draft, or what the finished film would have been like if […]

Upon its release in the summer of 1981, Roadgames, the second (and final) collaboration of director Richard Franklin and writer Everette De Roche after 1978’s Patrick, became the most expensive Australian film ever made up to that point (a title it would hold only for a few weeks, until the opening of Gallipoli). That is, […]

Given the way I’m framing this summer’s marathon of horror movies, it’s hard to resist the temptation to speculate about the “Australianness” of these films, how their peculiarities reveal something about the cultural character of that continent and its film production. The fact that I don’t really know all that much about Australian culture puts […]

A review requested by Kelleson, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! “Adult animation” is a category so broad as to be meaningless,* but I bet if I just put […]

Intermittently 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: in Don’t Let Go, a cop is able to communicate across time with a dead relative and feed her the […]

Part of the Summer 2019 Netflix Jubilee I can think of one thing that’s interesting to me about Extremely Wicked, Shocking Evil and Vile, a heavy hitter at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival that ended up as one of Netflix’s biggest releases of the year. Namely, it provides an especially clear demonstration of the truth […]

Hammer Film Productions made its reputation on a series of violent (by the standards of the time) horror movies set in the latter half of the 19th Century. And while only a handful of them took place anywhere in the British Isles, they were all suffused with a certain distinctive Englishness. That would all make […]

In the latter half of the 2010s, “it’s like an episode of Black Mirror” has replaced “it’s like Philip K. Dick” as the hackiest, laziest way you can describe any work of science fiction. But Anon courts that comparison more vigorously than most. Not just because it’s a satiric treatment of contemporary social ills in […]