The project that has finally emerged as The Trial of the Chicago 7, a direct-to-Netflix that was supposed to be Paramount’s big awards push and the inaugural film of Oscar movie season back in the Before Times, has been percolating since 2006. That was when Steven Spielberg commissioned Aaron Sorkin to write a film based […]
I would never have thought of this on my own, but now that I’ve been put in mind of it, it makes perfect sense that American International Pictures and Amicus Productions would team up together. You could never say that they occupy the same spot in their respective ecosystems, because the Hollywood and British film […]
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 […]
As the Crow Flies A review by Brennan Klein Look, we all already know this is gonna be a weird Halloween. Trick or treating will be reduced to some socially distanced replacement (I vote candy cannons). Large gatherings of costume parties are off the menu this year. Bobbing for apples should definitely be avoided. And […]
Among those classic horror fans who are responsible for keeping its memory alive at all, Amicus Productions is first and foremost associated with its series of anthology films (or “portmanteaus”, to use the official company line), so much so that one might suppose they never made anything else. On the contrary, the studio was awfully […]
There’s a moment that typifies everything about Extraction so perfectly that I’m almost ashamed to mention it. In the film, a burly action throwback to the early ’90s or late ’80s, spiced up with contemporary digital post-production wizardry, the hero is an Australian mercenary named Tyler Rake. At one point in an early action scenes, […]
Between 1960 and 1963, Ingmar Bergman directed five feature films, and four of them were the most intensely depressing work of his career as it then stood. In particular, the one-two punch of 1963’s Winter Light and The Silence, a pair of films in which he dove headfirst into watching the degree to which human […]
Senioritis Editor’s note: with this review of Spontaneous, we’re happy to welcome Brennan Klein to the team as “permanent guest” reviewer. At Brennan’s request, I’ll be marking out all of his reviews so you don’t accidentally think they’re by me, but we look forward to having him help cover some of the many VOD releases […]
The Deadly Bees, from 1966, isn’t really a very good movie – it’s fine. It’s got some largely good and charming moments, some dumb moments, and some aggressively bad effects. But it has a longstanding reputation for being terrible beyond words, which comes I think from two different things. First, credited screenwriter Robert Bloch had […]
I would like to start by pushing back against the idea that The Assistant, the first narrative feature directed by experimental documentarian Kitty Green, is “about” disgraced former movie mogul and present convicted sex criminal Harvey Weinstein. This in fact seems to me very much against the point of the movie: if we say, Ah, […]
From 1961 through around 1968-ish, if you were a commercial movie studio and you had literally any presence in the horror/thriller markets, at some point you were going to make your own version of Psycho. There’s simply nothing else to it: Alfred Hitchcock’s grimy little quickie about murder, sexual psychosis, and fucking around with the […]
A review requested by Brennan, 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! If I were to tell you the plot of Even the Wind Is Afraid – even if I […]
