For more (that’s more positive) about Scare Me, check out Rob & Carrie’s interview with writer-director-star Josh Ruben! It is inordinately easy to root for Scare Me (one of two films by that title with extremely similar loglines released in 2020; this is the one picked up by the streaming service Shudder as an exclusive). The feature debut writer-director Josh Ruben, formerly of CollegeHumor, is an extremely good-faith attempt to […]

Here’s the headline, in our interview with Josh Ruben writer/director/star of the new feature SCARE ME, Rob is 95% sure Josh tells him he’s good looking. To be sure, you’ll need to listen for yourself.  For added hilarity, you can see the live reaction when Rob *thinks* that Josh tells him he’s good looking.  Imagine when Charlie sees that he’s found the golden ticket. So SCARE ME… Two writers of varying […]

Here’s the headline, in our interview with Josh Ruben writer/director/star of the new feature SCARE ME, Rob is 95% sure Josh tells him he’s good looking. To be sure, you’ll need to listen for yourself.  For added hilarity, you can see the live reaction when Rob *thinks* that Josh tells him he’s good looking.  Imagine when Charlie sees that he’s found the golden ticket. So SCARE ME… Two writers of varying […]

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking back at Gigli, serial murderer of careers, reputations, and romances, nominee for nine Razzies, winner of six including Worst Picture, and eventual nominee for Worst Movie of the 2010s. The Razzies can smell blood from many months […]

It makes one feel at least slightly like an easy mark to be enormously enthusiastic for The Taste of Things, a movie that feels like it was created in a lab for people with middlebrow tastes who felt “sophisticated” when they watched European art cinema in the 1990s. It’s French. It stars Juliette Binoche. Approximately 85% of the plot involves people cooking eating, or talking about cooking and eating. We […]

I’m not sure that 1986 is the literal earliest year it’s even possible to conceive of such a thing as a feature film adaptation of a video game (the Pac-Man television series was already four years old at that point, and if you can make a television series based on a video game, you can at least conceive of a full-length film), but it’s pretty damn early in the life […]

There’s no reason for a film as flat and uninspired as Leatherface to have taken such a painful path into the world as it did. The short version: Lionsgate and Millennium Films acquired the rights to make several Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels, but ended up dawdling so long on releasing the two it actually paid for that it ended up losing those rights. And “dawdling” is the only word: Texas […]

[Editor’s note: Starting today, Mandy’s Raspberry Picking series arrives at its permanent home on the schedule. Look for for future essays on the second Tuesday of every month!] Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at Inchon, winner of four Razzies (including Worst Picture) and loser […]

Everyone please give a warm welcome to our new contributor, Mandy Albert! Hello and welcome to a new ongoing series here at Alternate Ending: Raspberry Picking, where we re-evaluate the “winners” of the Golden Raspberry Awards! Are they really as bad as the contemporary critics made them out to be? Are some of them Good, Actually? We will answer these questions and more in our journey to the (alleged) bottom […]

Birthdays have a way of focusing one’s attention on where he has been and how he got here. Birthdays that end in 0 do this even more so. Today is my birthday, and it’s one of the ones ending in 0. I have built the four decades of my life around movies. Watching them, writing about them, teaching other people how to watch and write about them. For a very, […]

A review requested by Jack, 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! The anecdote that I think most faultlessly sums up everything there is to say about The Transformers: The Movie, a 1986 feature cartoon adapted from a television series based upon a toy line, […]

Brink of Life is an overlooked film in Ingmar Bergman’s career, possibly because he later stepped away from it, but it feels to me like a crucial example of his developing career at the end of the 1950s. On top of being, in its own right, a terrific acting showcase, which by this point was just to be expected from a Bergman film. But this one is so terrific at […]