Truth in advertising: The Dark and the Wicked is basically nothing else beyond the two adjectives promised by its title. The fourth film directed by Bryan Bertino (whose failure to generate a high-profile career after his 2008 debut The Strangers remains a bizarre mystery to me) is the latest entry in the blossoming genre of “family drama-horror”, and it’s at least a solid contribution to the form, but its real […]

This week we had the chance to sit down with The Dark and the Wicked producer, Adrienne Biddle.  We talked about the making of the film and our feelings on the movie, but we ended up spending a good chunk of time discussing her path to becoming a film producer.  Schooling, early grunt-jobs, relationship building, the whole thing. It was such an enlightening conversation because I’ve always wondered what a […]

If there’s one key takeaway from our conversation with Adrienne Biddle on  becoming a movie producer it’s that it’s probably more work than we could handle. Maybe not too much work for you, but definitely for us.  Long hours, lots of travel, long stretches away from home, menial jobs before you work your way up… but if you love what you do, then it never really feels like work, they […]

Although it absolutely does suffer from having as its protagonists a pair of idiots idiotic even by the standard of an Idiot Plot, The Strangers absolutely deserves this much praise: it is a ridiculously well-crafted scary movie. Maybe not good enough to rise to the pantheon (the last film to reach that height, I’d wager, was Neil Marshall’s The Descent in 2005), but it met the only standard that’s ultimately […]