So we arrive at what is, as of March, 2012, the last film in the much-derided and wholly-deridable Leprechaun franchise, and the first of the six that can be plausibly considered as an actual sequel to anything that has gone before it. I speak of 2003’s Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood, of course, which doesn’t […]

The easiest, and indeed most accurate, way to describe Footnote would make it sound like an absolute chore: an Israeli family dramedy about a father and son pair of feuding Talmudic scholars, recently nominated for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar. If you are anything like me, the only word in that description that was […]

In the wake of Leprechaun 4: In Space, the Leprechaun series really didn’t have any choice but to improve, assuming of course that in the wake of Leprechaun 4: In Space anybody still gave a shit about the franchise on any level. And initially, it seemed like nobody giving a shit was exactly the fate […]

2012 is shaping up to be a banner year for Event Movies, and thank God for it – great cinema is nice and all, but there’s something to be said for the sort of ginormous popular hit that everybody’s excited to see and excited after they see it, and mostly people like it even if […]

In the late 1990s, noted English music artist Sting was hired by Walt Disney Feature Animation to write the songs for a new film the studio was developing, titled Kingdom of the Sun. He agreed, including the small proviso that his wife, movie producer Trudie Styler, be allowed to tag along to make a documentary […]

There is a notion with some currency out in the wide world that outer space is where horror franchises go to die; it is the modern analogue to how every Universal Studios monster series famously ended with a visit from Abbott and Costello. To a certain degree, this trend is overstated, but there are enough […]

With Leprechaun 3 in 1995, the franchise made its perhaps inevitable leap to the muggy swamps of direct-to-video horror, from whence it never returned. “And who would be able to tell?” I thought during every cheap-ass moment of Leprechaun and Leprechaun 2, assuming that the chintzy props and bargain basement supporting casts and tacky lighting […]

We all know by now that 21 Jump Street is actually, like, startlingly good, right? That, even though it looks hokey and dumb, it turns that dumbness to its advantage, makes a tool of it, et cetera. Well, if you managed to avoid hearing all that, you know it now: the movie is sort of […]

You didn’t think I’d stop with just one? Faith and begorrah, there are six of the fecking things! The first Leprechaun wasn’t exactly a box-office dynamo, but it cost pocket change to make it, and profitable horror films weren’t on every street corner back in 1993, so Trimark Pictures greenlit a sequel in short order, […]

So, it’s not EXACTLY a St. Patrick’s Day movie; but it’s also not exactly St. Patrick’s Day any longer. My apologies, but surely it’s close enough that we can still enjoy one of the gaudiest misuses of Irish culture since… actually, there a shitload of gaudy misuses of Irish culture. But this one is still […]

Once upon a time, there was a film director named Leo McCarey, who was beloved. He was beloved by mainstream Hollywood, who gave him several Oscar nominations and a victory for Going My Way in 1944; he was beloved by French critics, who spent a lot of energy exploring how brilliantly he made films in […]

To a certain kind of film lover – the kind writing this film blog, for starters – the phrase “pre-Code” sparks a particular kind of joy. It refers to the thin window between the arrival of sound in 1929 and the time late in 1934 when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, and the […]