So, I was watching Final Destination 5, and as one will at such times, wound up thinking about Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red. Specifically, about the final scene, so if you haven’t seen the Three Colors trilogy, be wary of spoilers.* Though you should really already be on your guard for that, this being a review […]

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: Final Destination 5 would appear to call for a violent horror movie, but thanks to the Summer of Blood, […]

It is a mathematical certitude that (the 1980s) + (horror film) + (financial success, however modest) = (instant sequel), and that equation is only strengthened when the horror film in question film boasts a leading villain who became an icon from the first instant he appeared on the posters. So the existence of Hellbound: Hellraiser […]

Sergio Leone received onscreen credit for directing only seven features, and of that number, five are Westerns. We’ll never know exactly what it was that drove the man to focus so relentlessly on one single genre, but one of the reasons, surely, was that he was really damn good at it. Right out of the […]

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 […]

August is traditionally (tradition = since around the late 1990s) meant to be the winding-down part of the summer, when the films that aren’t really meant to be good are released; what that has actually meant for three years running is that the August releases tend to be the slightly more personal and idiosyncratic ones […]

There are not very many horror writers whose work has managed to penetrate into the mainstream, and if you were to poll the first dozen people you ran into on the street to name the first one to jump to mind, you’d get eleven “Stephen Kings” and maybe one “Edgar Allan Poe” if you had […]

Being the first in a retrospective series celebrating the work of legendary Italian genre film director Sergio Leone The name of politician and author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is but poorly remembered now, though he was once one of the most popular English-language novelists in the world in his heyday, back in the first half of […]

If I happened to be teaching a class in screenwriting, I’d be overjoyed to have Crazy, Stupid, Love. as a case study: it’s the best and most frustrating kind of good-but-not-great movie, in which the specific, singular script flaw that holds it back is absurdly obvious and easy to fix, but so profound in its […]

If there is a worse subgenre in existence right now than the “live-action people interacting with CGI critters, very likely adapted from an old cartoon series”, I don’t want to know what it is: birthed with 2002’s Scooby-Doo and 2004’s Garfield though it didn’t blast into the stratosphere until 2007’s Alvin and the Chipmunks, it […]

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: Cowboys & Aliens. That is some seriously high-concept shit right there. How are you supposed to even start competing […]